Dialectic and Paradox: Configurations of the Third in Modernity (Cultural History and Literary Imagination) 9783034307147, 9783035304473, 3034307144

Citation preview

CULTURAL HISTORY AND LITERARY IMAGINATION

Ian Cooper is Lecturer in German at the University of Kent, England. He is the author of numerous publications on modern German and English literature and intellectual history. Bernhard F. Malkmus is Assistant Professor of German at the Ohio State University, USA. His research focuses on ethical, social and cultural aspects of modernity.

Dialectic and Paradox: Configurations of the Third in Modernity

The volume offers an approach which is both systematic and genealogical, providing innovative perspectives on such major thinkers as Adorno, Agamben, Derrida, C. S. Peirce, the Romantics and Simmel as well as phenomena like the psychology of jealousy and envy, the epistemic status of scientific images and conceptions of metabolism. It is the first attempt to look at configurations of the third as a paradigm for the ‘unfinished project of modernity’ (Habermas).

Cooper and Malkmus (eds) •

From Hegel to the present, the humanities and social sciences have revealed the volatile power of third agency. Systems of thought and practice are often disturbed by the presence of a figure that exceeds traditional binary oppositions. The articles in this volume trace the role of these triadic figures across a broad range of discourses in social theory, philosophy and science studies. Modernity emerges as a mode of system-formation, perpetuation and self-reflection that is deeply rooted in the dynamics of dialectic and paradox.

Dialectic and Paradox Configurations of the Third in Modernity

IAN COOPER AND B E R N H A R D F. M A L K M U S ( E D S ) ISBN 978-3-0343-0714-7

www.peterlang.com

Peter Lang

CULTURAL HISTORY AND LITERARY IMAGINATION

Ian Cooper is Lecturer in German at the University of Kent, England. He is the author of numerous publications on modern German and English literature and intellectual history. Bernhard F. Malkmus is Assistant Professor of German at the Ohio State University, USA. His research focuses on ethical, social and cultural aspects of modernity.

Dialectic and Paradox: Configurations of the Third in Modernity

The volume offers an approach which is both systematic and genealogical, providing innovative perspectives on such major thinkers as Adorno, Agamben, Derrida, C. S. Peirce, the Romantics and Simmel as well as phenomena like the psychology of jealousy and envy, the epistemic status of scientific images and conceptions of metabolism. It is the first attempt to look at configurations of the third as a paradigm for the ‘unfinished project of modernity’ (Habermas).

Cooper and Malkmus (eds) •

From Hegel to the present, the humanities and social sciences have revealed the volatile power of third agency. Systems of thought and practice are often disturbed by the presence of a figure that exceeds traditional binary oppositions. The articles in this volume trace the role of these triadic figures across a broad range of discourses in social theory, philosophy and science studies. Modernity emerges as a mode of system-formation, perpetuation and self-reflection that is deeply rooted in the dynamics of dialectic and paradox.

Dialectic and Paradox Configurations of the Third in Modernity

IAN COOPER AND B E R N H A R D F. M A L K M U S ( E D S )

www.peterlang.com

Peter Lang

Dialectic and Paradox

CULTURAL HISTORY AND LITERARY IMAGINATION EDITED BY CHRISTIAN J. EMDEN & DAVID MIDGLEY VOL. 19

PETER LANG

Oxford • Bern • Berlin • Bruxelles • Frankfurt am Main • New York • Wien

Dialectic and Paradox Configurations of the Third in Modernity Ian Cooper and Bernhard F. Malkmus (eds)

PETER LANG

Oxford • Bern • Berlin • Bruxelles • Frankfurt am Main • New York • Wien

Bibliographic information published by Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbiblio­ grafie; detailed bibliographic data is available on the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Control Number: 2013931609

Cover image: M.C. Escher’s ‘Three Spheres II’ © 2012 The M.C. Escher Company-Holland. All rights reserved. www.mcescher.com ISSN 1660-6205 ISBN 978-3-0343-0714-7 (print) ISBN 978-3-0353-0447-3 (eBook) © Peter Lang AG, International Academic Publishers, Bern 2013 Hochfeldstrasse 32, CH-3012 Bern, Switzerland [email protected], www.peterlang.com, www.peterlang.net All rights reserved. All parts of this publication are protected by copyright. Any utilisation outside the strict limits of the copyright law, without the permission of the publisher, is forbidden and liable to prosecution. This applies in particular to reproductions, translations, microfilming, and storage and processing in electronic retrieval systems. Printed in Germany

Contents

Bernhard F. Malkmus and Ian Cooper

Triadic Concepts in the Humanities and Social Sciences – An Introduction 1 Part I  Social Theory

23

A Conversation with Zygmunt Bauman

From Ethics to Justice: The Role of the Triad in Modern Social Imagination 25 Ulrich Bröckling

Governing by Triangulation: On Mediation

37

Paul Stenner

Foundation by Exclusion: Jealousy and Envy

53

Joachim Fischer

Turn to the Third: A Systematic Consideration of an Innovation in Social Theory 81 Part II  Philosophy 103 Andreas Dittrich

The Absent Third: Negative Dialectics in Adorno’s and Derrida’s Accounts of  Cognition and Language

105

vi

Guido Naschert

The Problem of  Antinomy and its Pragmatic Dimension in Early Romantic Philosophy

127

Benjamin Robinson

Two or Three? – A Case for Two

141

Part III  History of  Science

165

Christian J. Emden

Uncertain Things, Visually Enhanced: On the Production of Epistemic Images 167 Hannah Landecker

The Metabolism of  Philosophy, in Three Parts

193

Jeannie Moser

The Biography of a Psychotropic Substance: Epistemic Figures of  the Third in LSD – My Problem Child by Albert Hofmann

225

Notes on Contributors

251

Index 255

Bernhard F. Malkmus and Ian Cooper

Triadic Concepts in the Humanities and Social Sciences – An Introduction

Whatever happened between 1770 and 1800, during the thirty years that the philosopher of  history Reinhart Koselleck famously compared to a mountain saddle or col (Sattelzeit), things were not quite the same towards the end of  that period as they had been at its beginning.1 From Windermere in Northern England to the short-lived Mainz Republic in Central Germany and the Greek mercantile diaspora community Filiki Eteria in Odessa, people suddenly found themselves swept up in revolutionary enthusiasm; or they were scared to death by revolutionary terrorism under the Jacobins in Paris, Napoleon’s hegemonic swiftness in restructuring Europe in its entirety, and the ensuing instability after his demise outside Moscow and Waterloo. Not even the wide-ranging political restoration after 1815 in the wake of  the Congress of  Vienna – one of  the most concerted ef forts in European history to turn back the clock – returned people’s dreams, nightmares, hopes and fears to the eighteenth century. In frustrating the political and social impetus of  those aspirations and anxieties, the project of restoration instead propelled them forward. One way of  talking about this ‘mountain saddle’ or col, and illustrating the emergence of what we have come to call ‘modernity’, is numerical. The eighteenth century thought in twos, modernity thinks in threes. Obviously a stark simplification, this is, however, as we hope to show in this volume, a useful observation. The eighteenth century hearkens back to concepts of cosmic, intellectual, social and political orders that are structured according to binary oppositions: heaven versus earth, res cogitans versus res extensa, 1

See, for example, Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past. On the Semantics of  Historical Time (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press), 267–76.

2

Bernhard F. Malkmus and Ian Cooper

free social strata versus unfree social strata, sovereign power versus body politic. The nineteenth century projects forward a vision of cosmic, intellectual, social and political orders that have yet to be established or will always remain in f lux: forms of pantheism and atheism begin to compete seriously with monotheism; dialectical and self-ref lexive modes of  thinking revolutionize the concept of  human knowledge; meritocratic and less centralized forms of political power develop. In each of  these new conceptual forms, the figure which variously postpones the completion of  the system or holds it in f lux can be classified as a third agent: it is a figure which disrupts the old binaries. But what happened to bring about this change of  focus? A brief glance at three seminal thinkers around 1800 (Goethe, Kant, Hegel) will facilitate an exploration of  the intellectual tectonics of  the age; and engaging with a late nineteenth-century observer of  these changes (Nietzsche) will allow us to put them in perspective for the age to come.2 Johann Wolfgang Goethe’s landmark novel Elective Af finities (1809) of fers the following meta-ref lection on its plot and characters: ‘And in any situation nothing is more significant than the intervention of a third party.’3 Taking its guiding metaphor of elective af finities from chemistry, the novel draws up an emotional experiment involving two couples and a kind of marriage counsellor as mediator figure. The psychological dynamism set in motion by various interventions among these characters constitutes a narrative meditation on subjectivity, friendship, love and marriage. The detached narrator observes these ‘interventions’ of  third agents and triangulations of emotions and, through subtle irony, marks them as indicative of  hidden fundamental epistemic changes. The protagonists have retreated to a country estate and shield themselves from society, trying to preserve their low aristocratic habitus against the danger of social decline by designing a garden landscape that ref lects their passions and unlived emotions. Yet, precisely 2 3

See Reinhard Brandt, D’Artagnan und die Urteilskraft: über ein Ordnungsprinzip der europäischen Kulturgeschichte (1,2,3/4) (Stuttgart: Steiner, 1991). Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Elective Af finities. A Novel, trans. David Constantine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 8; the original reads: ‘Nichts ist bedeutender in jedem Zustand, als die Dazwischenkunft eines Dritten.’ See Sämtliche Werke, vol. 8, ed. Waltraud Wiethölter (Frankfurt/Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1994), 277.

Triadic Concepts in the Humanities and Social Sciences – An Introduction

3

in the midst of  this failed utopian space and experimental emotional setting, the ‘intervention of a third party’ becomes the driving psychological element, ultimately leading to the catastrophic ending. At the very core of a private mythology, represented by the secluded garden topography and its social inaccessibility, triangulation as a foundational principle of sociality can be observed. Still relying on the stratum-based sense of privilege and social rank, Goethe’s protagonists already exercise a social dynamism that is more characteristic of socially dif ferentiated societies – the kind of meritocracies they will have to adjust to in the course of  the fundamental changes they have managed to stall. The power of  third agencies in Goethe goes beyond simply providing an overture to René Girard’s widely received reading of nineteenth-century novels as ref lections on the mimetic nature of desire; it also spells out profound implications for our understanding of the conf licted co-emergence of modern subjectivity and modern meritocratic societies.4 This co-emergence, and its implied precarious condition of the modern subject, is closely related to Immanuel Kant’s attempts to conceptualize the sources and limitations of  human knowledge in his Critique of  Pure Reason.5 In the first edition (1781), Kant mentions three sources of  know­ ledge, namely sense (Sinn), imagination (Einbildungskraft) and apperception (Apperzeption). Einbildungskraft was deleted in the second edition (1789) and subordinated to reason.6 This, however, leads to the suspicion, 4

5

6

Recent accounts of  third agents in modern literature can be found in sections II and III of  Eva Eßlinger, Tobias Schlechtriemen, Doris Schweitzer, and Alexander Zons, eds, Die Figur des Dritten. Ein kulturwissenschaftliches Paradigma (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 2010) and in Ian Cooper, Bernhard Malkmus, and Ekkehard Knörer, eds, Third Agents: Secret Protagonists of  Modern Imagination (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008). Immanuel Kant, Critique of  Pure Reason, trans. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1998), 237–8 [§ A118–19]; for the original see Kritik der reinen Vernunft, ed. Raymund Schmidt (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1990), 172a–5a. Cf. Kant, Critique of  Pure Reason, § A 115; see Hartmut Böhme and Gernot Böhme, ‘The Battle of  Reason with the Imagination’, in What Is Enlightenment? EighteenthCentury Answers and Twentieth-Century Questions, ed. James Schmidt (Berkeley: University of  California Press, 1996), 426–52, here 426–8.

4

Bernhard F. Malkmus and Ian Cooper

expressed by John F. Rundell in his reading of  Kant, that imagination is always present in his conceptualization of reason. In their attempt to understand the world, humans can only activate reason through imagination; reason or imagination, however, ‘never exist in their own right, but solely in the context of  human unsocial sociability’. They have to be conceived of as transcendental: ‘imagination becomes paradoxically the concealed, yet “real”, condition of all knowledge.’7 Imagination as a hidden third agent between the human faculty of reason and society (as an emergent unity), in this interpretation, both interferes with and facilitates the processing of empirical conditions through reason.8 In the process, humans establish and ref lect on their epistemological conditions in the interstices between the way reality presents itself and the way the human mind represents it. Goethe’s novel can also be read as an extensive meditation on the workings of  human imagination and the protagonists’ attempt and ultimate failure to distil subjective imagination through a rational design and its representation. It is a failed experiment in subjugating imagination to an empirically verifiable faculty. Two years before the appearance of  Elective Af finities, G.W.F. Hegel published his Phenomenology of  Spirit (1807). Here, Hegel also develops, at a critical juncture, the notion of  third agency as variously – or simultaneously – facilitating and disturbing structures of social being. Hegel’s dialectic of master and slave has been described as a ‘secular parable’.9 In it, the language of imaginative construction becomes a fully adequate expression of conceptual principle. Hegel’s narrative establishes a pattern 7

8

9

John F. Rundell, ‘Introduction’, in Gillian Robinson and John F. Rundell, eds, Rethinking Imagination: Culture and Creativity (London: Routledge 1994), 1–14, here 7. See also Martin Heidegger, Phenomenological Interpretation of  Kant’s Critique of  Pure Reason (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), 292–3. For an account of  the role of  ‘transcendental imagination’ in twentieth-century philosophy see Daniel Dahlstrom, ‘The Critique of  Pure Reason and Continental Philosophy: Heidegger’s Interpretation of Transcendental Philosophy’, in Paul Guyer, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Kant’s Critique of  Pure Reason (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 380–400, esp. 389–94. Robert B. Pippin, Hegel’s Idealism: The Satisfactions of  Self-Consciousness (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 162.

Triadic Concepts in the Humanities and Social Sciences – An Introduction

5

of reconfiguring binary structures by way of a drama of recognition, and its implications resonate in modern theories of sociality from Wilhelm Dilthey to Niklas Luhmann, as well as in philosophical accounts of otherness and death extending from Martin Heidegger to Emmanuel Levinas and Giorgio Agamben. But the notion of  third agency put forward by Hegel in his master-slave analysis is highly dynamic (the Phenomenology is charged, to cite Charles Taylor, with a powerful ‘sense of crisis’10), not straightforward to discern, and has nothing in common with the conciliatory logic of synthesis ascribed to Hegel by an inf luential line of  Marxian interpretation. There is, for Hegel, a primal stance of interactive opposition – of one consciousness having to do with another – attendant on the inescapable fact of social relation. There is, then, intersubjectivity before there is (dialectically articulated) subjectivity.11 From the opposition emerges a struggle aimed at the ‘death of  the other’ (‘auf den Tod des Anderen’12), the seemingly inevitable result of which, annihilation, is only averted by the recognition by one actor of  the negation which confronts it in its being with the other. That other, presenting itself  to its opponent as the threat of death, is acknowledged by its opponent – who becomes in that moment the ‘slave’ – as having ‘mastery’ over it, as being possessed of  the power to destroy it. The coordinates of subjectivity, the paradigm of master and slave, are inherently unstable. This is so, firstly, because master-subjectivity paradoxically demands recognition from a source (the slave) it does not itself acknowledge as significant and, secondly, because slave-subjectivity has already recognized more than the master ever can, namely the threat

10 11

12

Charles Taylor, Sources of  the Self: The Making of  the Modern Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 388. See for example Hannes Kuch, ‘Der Herr, der Knecht und der Dritte – bei und nach Hegel’, in Thomas Bedorf, Joachim Fischer, and Gesa Lindemann, eds, Theorien des Dritten. Innovationen in Soziologie und Sozialphilosophie (Munich: Fink 2010), 91–116, here 95. G.W.F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of  Mind, trans. J.B. Baillie (New York: Harper & Row, 1967), 232; for the original see Werke. Theorie Werkausgabe, ed. Karl Michel and Eva Moldenhauer, 20 vols (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1970), III, 148.

6

Bernhard F. Malkmus and Ian Cooper

of death on account of which it chose subordination in the first place. Negation, rather than any metaphysical superiority of one perspective over the other, animates the relationship and, ultimately, discloses the relationship’s contingency. Thus negation is a third element through which the relation of  Hegel’s two subjective agents appears in a new light. But ‘the third’ here is not another figure introducing itself into a dual structure and complicating it. Indeed it is not anything. It is nothing – the absence of any point of reference in the constellation of master and slave which is other than the constellation’s exposure to death or the workings of what Hegel terms ‘evanescence’ (‘Verschwinden’13). From the slave’s insight into the (absent) third of negation, however, emerges a new sphere of interaction in a world of  things, in which arbitrary power fades from view. The new sphere is one of concrete presence, of  ‘das Ding’ – that is, of natural objects worked over not for the contingent satisfaction of  the master, but in subjective recognition of objectively manifested freedom – which mediates the relation between subjects defined not by feudal mastery but by the shared activity of work. Hegel’s ‘things’, and the realm of  transaction in which they implicitly have meaning, dialectically reinstate, at the heart of a developed sociality but beyond binary patterns of desire and subjugation, that primary intersubjectivity without which it makes no sense to speak of subjects at all.14 In terms both of German intellectual history and of the wider conceptual questions addressed in this volume, one of the most powerful philosophical responses to the Hegelian speculative model comes with Friedrich Nietzsche’s attack on Hegel, beginning with The Birth of Tragedy (1872) and continuing in dif ferent forms throughout his subsequent work. In the early work on tragedy, Nietzsche is concerned with a binary opposition between appearance (subsumed under the aegis of Apollo) and primordial reality (the domain, in Nietzsche’s terms, of Dionysus). Into this duality, Nietzsche

13 14

Ibid., 238; III, 153. See Jef frey Church, Infinite Autonomy: The Divided Individual in the Political Thought of  G.W.F. Hegel and Friedrich Nietzsche (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2012), esp. ch. 4 and 5.

Triadic Concepts in the Humanities and Social Sciences – An Introduction

7

attempts to insert a third mode of understanding in which subjectivity grasps the world as an ‘aesthetic phenomenon’ – that is, as revealing its reality most fully to an artistic consciousness understood as constructing that reality. In Nietzsche’s later work, the constructed nature of reality is approached through what Nietzsche terms genealogy, the laying bare of the various expressions of  ‘will to power’ which combine to determine our cultural, ethical and social imaginings. Michel Foucault once aptly characterized this ‘project’ of genealogy as an enterprise of ‘seeking’ the events ‘in the most unpromising places, in what we tend to feel is without history – in sentiments, love, conscience, instincts’.15 But genealogy, which in terms of Nietzsche’s earlier work foregrounds genetic, non-representational Dionysus over mimetic, formally apprehensible Apollo, itself seems to articulate ‘modernity’s yearning for a Beyond’ (to representation, mediation, language) in a way which makes that ostensibly anti-metaphysical project, in fact, eminently metaphysical.16 Hegel and Nietzsche are both committed to ‘the struggle against metaphysical, moral and epistemological dualism’, but where Hegel in the Phenomenology develops a method – a much modified variant of which is to be found in the later Wittgenstein – of analysing systems and ‘forms of  life’ in terms of  their rationally investigable ‘intrinsic character as self-knowledge’, Nietzsche uses the immanent stance to uncover their biological and neurological basis.17 He thus introduces, against the claim of  Hegelian dialectic, the possibility that the dynamic vitality of any ‘form of  life’ is necessarily resistant to being adequately thought. There is a non-conceptual basis which at once demands to be grasped and eludes speculative articulacy.18 It is accessible, perhaps, to a consciousness which

15 16 17 18

Michel Foucault, ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’, in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (London: Penguin, 1991), 76–100, here 76. James I. Porter, The Invention of  Dionysus: An Essay on The Birth of  Tragedy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 18. Stephen Houlgate, Hegel, Nietzsche and the Criticism of  Metaphysics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 16, 178. See also Robert Pippin, ‘Lightning and Flash, Agent and Deed’, in Otfried Höf fe, ed., Friedrich Nietzsche: Zur Genealogie der Moral (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2004), 47–63, here 56–62.

8

Bernhard F. Malkmus and Ian Cooper

can embrace its own constructed nature and thereby realize itself as participating in primal, inconceivable f lux. Dialectical transformation is replaced by paradoxical self-af firmation. But from a ‘dialectical’ perspective, the question must remain open whether the paradox in fact goes deeper than those who wish to af firm it can perceive: whether Nietzsche’s standpoint simply makes absolute the non-ref lective binary stances which it was the aim of speculative thought to reconfigure, and so must perpetually call into question its own adequacy as a means of analysing intersubjective agency. In various modes, these questions – concerning the position of  the third not only in dif ferent conceptual paradigms, but also between them – inform both the themes treated and the approaches adopted in this volume.

Social Theory In 1908, Georg Simmel published his study Sociology. Investigations on the Forms of  Sociation, which was to become one of  the seminal documents of early sociology.19 Simmel endorses an understanding of society as a perpetual process of  becoming social (Vergesellschaftung) – a process that is co-emergent with the self-ref lection of  human beings as individuals. These co-emergent genealogies of subjectivity and society are interlaced by reciprocal interdependencies (Wechselwirkungen) that constitute, according to Simmel, the very seeds of what we have come to call ‘society’. The paradigmatic figures of  the third – the mediator, the tertius gaudens, the sovereign – facilitate Vergesellschaftung and, at the same time, ensure that

19

Cf. Georg Simmel, Soziologie. Untersuchungen über die Formen der Vergesellschaftung, Gesamtausgabe, vol. 11, ed. Otthein Rammstedt (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1995), e.g. 33. The most important sections of  Soziologie are available in English in this compilation: The Sociology of  Georg Simmel, ed. and trans. Kurt Wolf f (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1950).

Triadic Concepts in the Humanities and Social Sciences – An Introduction

9

society remains a perpetual process rather than a solidified structure.20 The third agent in this concept exists prior to the ego and the alter ego of social interaction – as the very concept of intersubjectivity that destabilizes theories of alterity. Charles Taylor similarly proposes a triadic concept of social genesis that is dynamized by the poles individual, social institutions, and ‘social imaginaries’, which he, drawing on Wittgenstein’s ‘forms of life’, defines as ‘the way our contemporaries imagine the societies they inhabit and sustain’.21 Social imaginaries for Taylor possess a transcendental quality; they are the condition of  the possibility of societal cohesion; they are not ‘a set of ideas’, but rather constitute what ‘enables, through making sense of, the practices of society’.22 The first section of  this volume consists of explorations of  triadic configurations in social theory and praxis. Revolving around the dual operation and function of  third agents (stabilizing social interaction and disrupting solidified community formations23), these investigations discuss the genealogy of  the third in modern social theory and its co-emergence with sociology as a meta-discipline, observing and ref lecting on processes of social dif ferentiation in meritocracies. In the introductory interview, Zygmunt Bauman draws on his long career as a sociologist and the wealth of experience he has gained in gradually developing a comprehensive sociological theory of modernity and postmodernity. While he describes third agents and agencies as being constitutive for the emergence of sociality and society in general, he emphasizes that in ‘solid modernity’ – the term he tends to use for what is termed ‘late capitalism’ in other contexts – a veritable war was waged against ambivalence. This tendency has to be seen as a counter-movement to the unprecedented speed and acceleration of dif ferentiation processes in modernity 20 Ibid., 121–50. 21 Charles Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 6. 22 Ibid., 2. 23 Cf. Thomas Bedorf, ‘Stabilisierung und/oder Irritation. Voraussetzungen und Konsequenzen einer triadischen Sozialphilosophie’, in Thomas Bedorf, Joachim Fischer, Gesa Lindemann, eds, Theorien des Dritten. Innovationen in Soziologie und Sozialphilosophie (Munich: Fink, 2010), 13–32, here 13.

10

Bernhard F. Malkmus and Ian Cooper

and culminates in the total bureaucratization of  life in some of  the -isms of  the twentieth century. However, this war against ambivalence, according to Bauman, also gives rise to the formation of a particularly productive mould of imagination and counter-culture, which he associates with what Jacques Derrida calls ‘undecidables’.24 Among them are Hannah Arendt’s often-cited pariahs and parvenus, but also figures such as the trickster, the confidence man, and the pícaro (both as real-life characters and as literary representations), the social outsider, the mediator, the rival, the tertius gaudens, and many others. The quintessentially modern ‘undecidable’ and quintessentially undecidable modern for Bauman is the assimilated Jew in late nineteenth-century Central Europe, who also serves as historical point of reference for Simmel’s figure of  the stranger in his famous essay ‘The Stranger’, originally published as ‘Exkurs über den Fremden’ in Soziologie.25 Bauman’s astute and incisive analyses of our current Lebenswelt and its genealogy serves as a framework for two sociological case studies about triadic configurations in contemporary social praxes (Bröckling, Stenner) and a summarizing ref lection on the third agent in social theory in general (Fischer). Ulrich Bröckling’s meditation on mediation as a ‘social technology of conf lict management’ traces the development and institutionalization of neutral mediation as a method of dispute resolution in Western societies since the mid-1960s. Mediators employ standardized techniques of negotiation in order to prevent individual conf licts from turning into social conf licts. They thus form a decisive force in building social cohesion by virtue of interrupting the conf lict dynamic and focusing on potential continuities. Drawing on Michel Foucault’s works on modern governmentality, Bröckling studies mediation as a strategy of governing and self-governing and outlines the specific rationality of  this contemporary technology of peacemaking. He maintains that compared to, for example, a judge (who

24 See Bauman, Modernity and Ambivalence (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), 55–8. 25 Simmel, Georg, ‘The Stranger’, in On Individuality and Social Forms, ed. Donald N. Levine (Chicago: University of  Chicago Press, 1971), 143–50.

Triadic Concepts in the Humanities and Social Sciences – An Introduction

11

implements and thus reaf firms the law), the mediator is a socially less powerful but more productive agent. The anti-hierarchical and anti-bureaucratic impulse in mediation aims at resolving conf licts, fostering a culture of dialogue and an ethos of self-responsibility which can be regarded as intrinsically society-forming. Mediation has more recently grown into an institutionalized technology that creates ‘expert third agents’. It also renders the juridical culture more informal, since it ultimately leaves decisionmaking processes to the two conf licting parties – a double movement of  ‘indirect guidance of social relationships by simultaneous retraction of sovereign forms of exercising power’. In a second case study, Paul Stenner investigates the emotions of jealousy and envy, rooting them in triangular micro-social systems. In contrast to conventional psychological theory, which conceptualizes these emotions as discrete intrapsychic states of  feeling, he argues that they are better understood in terms of people’s involvements in dynamic micro-social systems that characteristically produce themselves by way of paradoxical relations to third parties. Focusing on this implicit triangular structure, he thus highlights their similarities. Drawing on empirical data and literary examples, he puts these emotions at the centre of  human subjectconstruction and analyses their mediated nature. Closely connected by what René Girard termed ‘mimetic desire’, envy and jealousy emerge from this study as ‘aspects of  broader psycho-social systems […] that reproduce themselves through the mechanism of  foundation and exclusion’ – in other words, as pervasive exclusionary mechanisms that constitute seeds of social systems. Drawing on thinkers such as Giorgio Agamben, Michel Serres and Niklas Luhmann, Stenner maintains that the inclusion of  the excluded (third, rival, scapegoat) is the generating principle of dif ferentiation and thus secures the survival of  the system as system. Third parties or agents first mediate the subject’s relation to the object, which then allows them to interrupt this relation and occupy the power established by it to begin with. Joachim Fischer, in his concluding ‘Systematic Consideration’, of fers a genealogy of  the third agent as a necessary theoretical mode of ref lection on social theory, complementing the discipline’s traditional concern with ‘the Other’. Emphasizing the aspect of intersubjectivity in the institutional

12

Bernhard F. Malkmus and Ian Cooper

self-ref lection of  the humanities and social sciences as academic disciplines, he makes a plea for introducing a third agent as driving momentum in the interaction between ego and alter ego, thus strengthening a sociological ref lection introduced by Georg Simmel’s notion of reciprocal interaction or interdependency. Fischer engages with various seminal debates in order to support his plea and then goes on to spell out the ‘ontological and methodological consequences’ of  this paradigm shift. He claims that institutions, symbolic orders, discourses and social systems only come into being by virtue of introducing a third party. Conceptualizing these third agents facilitates a second-order observation of society that is able to ref lect social dif ferentiation processes in actu and thus of fers both a systemic and systematic foundation of social theory as an academic discipline. Many of  the explorations in this section resonate with Bernhard Waldenfels’ ref lections on the third agent (Figur des Dritten), which are integrated into his wider typology and topography of  the stranger and of  being a stranger.26 Waldenfels elaborates on the role of  the third that is activated in any communication situation: ‘The Other, with whom I am communicating, takes on the role of a Third (as much as I do myself ), in so far as he always already intends a general meaning and implies a general claim to relevance.’27 This point of reference that operates as third agent in any given interaction can either be the object of  the communication, a witness, or a mediating presence – he/she/it will frame the interaction according to the indexicality of  the situation. The ‘general claim to relevance’ is the basis for Emmanuel Levinas’ ethics of responsibility, as articulated in a crucial passage of  Totality and Infinity: The face with which the Other turns to me is not reabsorbed in a representation of  the face. To hear his destitution which cries out for justice is not to represent an image to oneself, but is to posit oneself as responsible, both as more and as less than the being that presents itself in the face. Less, for the face summons me to my obligations and judges me. […] More, for my position as I consists in being able to

26 27

See in particular chapter 5 in Bernhard Waldenfels, Studien zur Phänomenologie des Fremden, vol. 1: Topographie des Fremden (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp 1997). Ibid., 116. [trans. BM]

Triadic Concepts in the Humanities and Social Sciences – An Introduction

13

respond to this essential destitution of  the Other, finding resources for myself. The Other who dominates me in his transcendence is thus the stranger, the widow, and the orphan, to whom I am obligated.28

These are questions germane to a philosophical investigation of  the foundations of society as well as the ongoing processes of  Vergesellschaftung and social systemic dif ferentiation – and the dif ficulties of sustaining an ethics of responsibility in this framework of modernity.

Philosophy In the twentieth century, social theory and philosophy met prominently in the work of  the Frankfurt School. Dialectic of  Enlightenment (1947), by Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, represents a major attempt to develop the Hegelian emphasis on negation in a way which questions the claims of  Hegel’s speculative concept (Begrif f). Adorno and Horkheimer take up Hegel’s account of master and slave, but with a twist. Whereas Hegel ends with the slave, who realizes history by disclosing his subjectivity as determinate (historical) substance while the master disappears into insignificance and natural decay, Adorno and Horkheimer give prominence to the master and his unredeemed attachment to nature. They see the master’s unconscious dependence on nature – which he expresses through desire – as characteristic of  life in the horizon of enlightened reason. The logic of dominion (and violence) is not overcome but perpetuated in the structures of mediation through which the dialectic seeks to master nature, or equalize dif ference.29 This insight gathers force in Adorno’s later project of  28 Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity. An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2007), 215. 29 See J.M. Bernstein, ‘Negative Dialectic as Fate: Adorno and Hegel’, in Tom Huhn, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Adorno (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 19–50, here 26.

14

Bernhard F. Malkmus and Ian Cooper

‘negative dialectics’, which emphasizes precisely the contradictions arising from dialectical processes of  thought and examines these contradictions as signs of resistance to unifying concepts – as ‘antagonisms in reality’.30 In his contribution to this volume, Andreas Dittrich pursues Adorno’s response to Hegel by means of a ref lection on the ‘absent third’. Third agency is a vital but ambivalent category in Adorno’s thought: vital because it is the site of resistance to mastery, and deeply ambivalent because necessarily implicated in mediation. Dittrich shows how the figure of  the ‘absent third’, derived from a critical interpretation of  Hegel, informs Adorno’s account of  both cognition and language. For Adorno, Hegel’s dialectical movement of content, concept and cognition cannot be concluded, because the item of cognition – or non-conceptual ‘substrate’ – eludes the reach of  the elucidating concept, much as nature eludes the reach of speculative history in Adorno’s reading of  the master-slave narrative. The absent third is therefore not – as it is in the Phenomenology – a speculatively transformable negation, but rather the measure of dif ference (or ‘non-identity’) between items of cognitive or linguistic intention and the claims of conceptual identification. Dittrich sets out to show how, on the basis of  this figure, Adorno challenges familiar philosophical notions of cognition and language. And appropriately, Dittrich links these explorations of  Adorno to a set of parallel ref lections on Derrida. Negative Dialectics and Of  Grammatology are brought together as two central, and complementary, modern texts in which Adorno and Derrida both conceive the absent third of speculative dialectic as unfolding a deconstructive potential, or what Derrida terms the operations of dif férance. Dittrich reveals the deep af finities between Adorno and Derrida as oblique and critical heirs to Hegelian thought, but also shows how their conceptions of  the absent third mark independent approaches to tertiarity as a fundamental philosophical question. Adorno’s negative dialectics may be seen as one culmination of a line in German Romantic philosophy whose understanding of opposition and

30 Ibid., 36. See also Birgit Sandkaulen, ‘Weltgeist und Naturgeschichte. Exkurs zu Hegel’, in Axel Honneth and Christoph Menke, eds, Theodor W. Adorno: Negative Dialektik (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2006), 169–87.

Triadic Concepts in the Humanities and Social Sciences – An Introduction

15

contradiction marks it of f  from Hegel’s speculative Idealism. This genea­ logy, leading from figures such as Novalis, Friedrich Schlegel and Friedrich Schleiermacher to modern critical theory as represented by, for example, Adorno and Walter Benjamin (and linking again, via a Heideggerian line, to Derrida and deconstruction), has over the last fifteen years become firmly established as a paradigm in intellectual history and hermeneutic theory.31 Guido Naschert addresses this context in his essay on ‘The Problem of  Antinomy’. Proceeding from early German Romantic concepts of dialectic, Naschert provides a reconstruction of  Romantic method as an ‘art of communicating truth’. Underlying his reconstruction is the ‘logic of antinomies’, or of certain types of non-trivial contradiction. The antinomies with which early German Romantic thought were concerned, he argues, are important because they cannot be disabled by means of a simple separation of  terms. On this basis Naschert formulates a connection between Romantic dialectic (especially as manifested in the work of  Schlegel) and the figure of  the third. For in opposition to many received views, he claims that Romantic dialectical thought is far from unsystematic or content with conceptual vagueness and inarticulacy, but rather represents a social practice characterized by the search for (transcendental) totality of  knowledge. For Schlegel, the logic of antinomy underlies a combinatorial thinking in which opposed elements of equal conceptual standing are to be brought together in a ‘point of indif ference’. His version of early German Romantic philosophy seeks – and achieves – a centred grasp of  the whole, in which however the twofold middle can be thought only in terms of a third which is essential by virtue of making no dif ference, of  being indif ferent. In the context of  the volume, Naschert’s essay elucidates its own figure of conjunction – a Romantic moment poised between the speculative claim of  Hegel and the absent thirds of  Adorno and Derrida. Hegel again looms large in the final essay of  this section. The account of death developed in the dialectic of master and slave plays a significant

31

See Andrew Bowie, From Romanticism to Critical Theory: The Philosophy of  German Literary Theory (London: Routledge, 1997).

16

Bernhard F. Malkmus and Ian Cooper

role in his later thought on language.32 The Hegelian constellation of death and language is one of  the most important background elements in the early work of  Agamben, especially his study Language and Death. There Agamben shows how, for Hegel, the deictic marker ‘this’ is dialectically disclosed as a linguistic universal. As Benjamin Robinson relates in his contribution on ‘Two or Three? – A Case for Two’, Hegel views deixis in terms of  ‘f leeting non-being’ which, taken up into the social and ethical conventions of  language, has a transforming ef fect on the community’s relationship to the ‘actuality’ of its negation in death, or to the inherent character of private voice as an enactment of disappearance. Agamben, argues Robinson, is concerned with the actuality of death in its semiotic dimension, or as the f leeting quality which characterizes the experience of  thinking and makes of it a pure ‘index’: a moment of secondness, in the vocabulary which Robinson’s essay derives systematically from C.S. Peirce. The secondness of  the index can be identified with the event of enunciation as yet untransformed through mediation or history. Robinson analyses a preoccupation in thinkers of ontological mediation – such as Agamben – with threefold structures which derive their claim from the determining, and incommensurable, presence of  the second. In these situations the insertion of  the mediating element – whether language or history – calls attention to the index in its sheer actuality, or to the inessentiality of  the human voice whose distinctness mediation is designed to secure. Thus the medium instantiated by language and history is frequently that of myth. For this reason Robinson points also to Hans Blumenberg as a thinker for whom, characteristically, ‘absolute reality is sublimated by a discourse of absolute metaphor’. Robinson’s wide-ranging analysis of  the part played by the second in schemes of  the third of fers, in addition to penetrating accounts of major figures, a rich and provocative ref lection on the respective systematic claims – philosophical, theological, and anthropological – of  the One, the Two and the Three.

32

On this topic generally, see Hegel and Language, ed. Jere O’Neill Surber (Albany: SUNY Press, 2006).

Triadic Concepts in the Humanities and Social Sciences – An Introduction

17

History of  Science In a body of work steeped in the philosophical lineage addressed in this volume, Hans Jonas undertook to challenge fundamentally the dualism bequeathed by Descartes to modern accounts of  the mind and of nature.33 He thereby combined an engagement with the modern intellectual tradition with investigations into the history of science, and laid out a framework for incorporating analysis of empirical phenomena into theories of social being and hermeneutics of representation.34 These concerns are taken up by the contributors to the final section of  this volume. In his essay ‘Uncertain Things, Visually Enhanced: On the Production of  Epistemic Images’, Christian J. Emden explores the epistemic status of visual evidence in the natural sciences. He distinguishes the standardized images of scientific findings, produced for public consumption, from what he calls ‘epistemic images’ – images that both represent and interfere with what they represent. His investigations focus on the role of visual evidence in the taxonomically and morphologically complex identification of  ‘water insects’, ‘polyps’, ‘hydra’ and ‘infusoria’ in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century science. He roots the scientific work of  Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, Abraham Trembley and Christian Gottfried Ehrenberg within their respective institutional frameworks, philosophical reference systems and resulting practices, and explores the epistemic battle between verbal and visual descriptions. He focuses in particular on Ehrenberg and shows how his translation of specimens into visual evidence created a ‘third state in which they were not yet detached from the objects that generated them, without having become fully standardized.’ Emden argues for an epistemic instability, claiming 33 34

See Hans Jonas, The Phenomenon of  Life: Toward a Philosophical Biology (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2001 [1966]). This combining of methodological forces is executed in exemplary fashion in Soraya de Chadarevian and Nick Hopwood, eds, Models: The Third Dimension of  Science (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004). Of particular interest for our discussion are James Griesemer, ‘Three-Dimensional Models in Philosophical Perspective’, 433–42, and Ludmilla Jordanova, ‘Material Models as Visual Culture’, 443–52.

18

Bernhard F. Malkmus and Ian Cooper

that these ‘epistemic images’ also change a discipline by introducing novelty before becoming standardized. The arrival of photography during the nineteenth century exacerbated the problem posed by the mediality of visual evidence: the more ‘immediate’ the visual evidence becomes, the more technical (or ‘medial’), the apparatus becomes that captures this evidence. In particular with photochemical processes, there is an intrinsic tension between novel phenomena and existing conceptual frameworks. The illusion of unmediated access relies on its opposite, ‘it is a result of  the need to alter the trace, or inscription, in order to turn it into a useful image.’ Emden makes a strong case for seeing ‘epistemic images’ as both part of a ‘mangle of practice’ and detached from it. He argues against a constructivist view that regards scientific results as predicated on the arrangement of  technological apparatuses and sees a ‘false epistemological alternative’ at work in current science studies. He deems both representationalism and naturalism reductionist and of fers his model of an ‘epistemic image’ as a configuration of  the third that intervenes in and, at the same time, is part of  the material world. Questions of intermediacy and autonomy are also at the heart of  Hannah Landecker’s contribution, investigating the status of metabolism as an agent of simultaneous exchange and continuity. Drawing in part on Jonas’ account of metabolism as the process through which an organism ‘persists as its same self, by not remaining the same matter’,35 Landecker discusses how, since its formulation as a scientific concept in the nineteenth century, metabolism has been a fundamental aspect of  biochemistry, philosophies of  life, and also sometimes of  theories of  the social body and body politic. She explores the emergence of a logic of  total conversion of  food into the body of  the eater in the work of  the French physiologist Claude Bernard. In Bernard’s experimental physiology, the experimental finding of an intermediating ‘nutritive reserve’ provided an all-important third term to the duality of organism and environment, body and food. It allowed a comprehension of each organism, whether animal or plant, as an agent capable of  transforming the environment into itself. The empirical 35 Jonas, Philosophy of  Life, 76.

Triadic Concepts in the Humanities and Social Sciences – An Introduction

19

data on nutrition in Bernard’s work was at the same time an articulation of a certain definition of  biological individuality and autonomy, in that the organism could persist as itself over time, despite the need constantly to ingest other living things. With the rise of a science of intermediary metabolism in the twentieth century, this nutritive reserve was re-characterized as a molecular ‘metabolic pool’ by the biochemist Rudolf  Schoenheimer. Schoenheimer, tracing the fate of  food molecules over time in the body with isotope markers, saw metabolism as ‘one great cycle’ of constant turnover of  body tissues and food-derived matter alike; there was no motor consuming the fuel running through it, because the body changed even as it changed the food coming into it. Hans Jonas, perhaps an unlikely diagnostician of  the metaphysics of intermediary metabolism, drew on this dynamic framework to build a philosophy of  biology around metabolism. For each figure metabolism functions as a third concept with ‘particular utility in the face of  the enduring antithesis of organism and environment’; these uses have accreted and stabilized as a thing called metabolism, becoming a defining characteristic of  life and autonomy. Landecker points to the paradox of  this ‘biology of  the in-between’, defined by dynamism and turnover, becoming ossified as an ahistorical and textbook topic at the end of  the twentieth century, but writes that the recent re-centring on metabolism in the context of obesity and diabetes in biomedical research is unsettling this stasis. Given metabolism’s history of intermediating not just between organism and environment, but between biology and the philosophy of  biology, we might then ask what metabolism of philosophy might emerge in the present day. In the final essay, Jeannie Moser brings together history of science and literary criticism, giving an account of a text in the light of epistemic questions touched on by Emden and Landecker, too.36 Moser addresses the story told by Albert Hofmann, the discoverer of  LSD, in his book LSD – My Problem Child: Ref lections on Sacred Drugs, Mysticism, and Science. Moser shows how, in his narrative of  the drug’s discovery, Hofmann

36

See Max Black, Models and Metaphors: Studies in Language and Philosophy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1962).

20

Bernhard F. Malkmus and Ian Cooper

employs literary techniques of rhetorical figuration to present LSD as something which, in accordance with ideas on the ‘coming into being of scientific objects’ proposed by Lorraine Daston, can be seen as having a ‘biography’ as both natural substance and discursive phenomenon. This dual function, or ‘fusion of narratives’, is for Moser an essential feature of  the ‘auto-experiment’, in which the roles of investigator and test person are conf lated, and in which subject and object merge and destabilize each other. The result is a third epistemic space, characterized by the infinite multiplication of  the object and the emergence of subjective experience as the elusive source of scientific credibility. The mutual co-determining of  these processes takes place in a hybrid area where experimental investigation ‘has to create that which it is called upon to bear witness to’. And this, Moser argues, brings Hofmann’s procedure as a science writer into proximity with the theoretical concerns explored by Bruno Latour in his concept of  the faitiche: figures of  the third which are at once ‘real/substantial/material and discursive/social/cultural’. The implications of such phenomena extend to the types of  figural genealogy which scientific writing brings to bear on its objects – notably, Moser shows, configurations of  family kinship used to elaborate a biography that is socially conditioned and conditioning as much as naturally given. Drawing on conceptions of meaning transfer associated with Derrida as well as on notions of observation and distance associated with systems theory, Moser makes a case that the upshot of  the auto-experiment’s epistemic complexity is the type of narrative – scientific but also necessarily literary – which Hofmann of fers, and which enacts constant transgression of  the borders which define experimental spaces. In a conversation with Michel Serres, Bruno Latour articulates his unease about the fact that social science is and has been ‘obsessed by subjects alone, by people interacting among themselves, and never speaks of objects per se’.37 The readings of fered in this final section, we hope, demon­ strate the extent to which nature–culture hybrids constitute one of  the conceptual backdrops of modernity, even if  they are, as Latour claims,

37

Bruno Latour and Michel Serres, Conversations on Science, Culture and Time (Ann Arbor: University of  Michigan Press, 1995), 200.

Triadic Concepts in the Humanities and Social Sciences – An Introduction

21

often side-lined in social theory. One of  the paradoxes of modernity is its avoidance of ambivalence and hybridity, as Bauman has shown, which nevertheless accelerates the production of  hybrids. Michel Serres’ quintessentially modern figure of  the parasite is an experimental metaphor that explores the preconditions of  the emergence of systemic complexity: ‘Theorem: noise gives rise to a new system, an order that is more complex than the simple chain. This parasite interrupts at first glance, consolidates when you look again.’38 Goethe’s ‘intervention of a third party’ comes full circle: the intervention or interruption is the basis for anything social and, at the same time, its precarious containment in the logic of subjective agency. Both Goethe’s third party and Serres’ parasite confront us with the same question: ‘are we in the pathology of systems or in their emergence and evolution?’39 And they help us rethink the social beyond Max Weber’s definition of social relations as meaningful relations between humans in an age when technological extensions of  the human physis and psyche increasingly redefine the nature of  these social relations. This volume is the fruit of discussions and conversations that originated in the conference Configurations of  the Third 1800 to the Present, held at St John’s College, Cambridge in August 2005 under the auspices of  the Department of  German at the University of  Cambridge, UK and the Graduiertenkolleg ‘Figur des Dritten’ at the University of  Konstanz, Germany. The editors would like to acknowledge with gratitude the financial support they have received from these institutions for this conference and the scholarly exchanges that emerged from it.

Michel Serres, The Parasite, trans. Lawrence R. Schehr (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), 14. 39 Ibid. 38

Part I

Social Theory

A conversation with Zygmunt Bauman

From Ethics to Justice: The Role of  the Triad in Modern Social Imagination

Professor Zygmunt Bauman, modernity the way you perceive it is marked by a hypertrophy of  triadic structures and third agents in social and political theory. Your work can be regarded as an extensive in-depth analysis of such structures and agencies, ranging from your cultural history of intellectuals to the quintessential role of  the stranger around 1900 and the concept of nomadism in postmodernity, or, to use your terminology, ‘liquid modernity’. Why do triadic structures play such an important role in your thinking and our time? I am not sure whether the author is the right person to ask this question, because it creates the impression that there was a design behind it. This idea rather developed by itself. I feel reminded of  Siegfried Kracauer’s posthumous book History: The Last Things Before the Last, a ref lection on the meaning of  historical analysis. He takes Marcel Proust as an example for the ‘logic’ of one’s development. Proust wrote seven volumes about the past – but he did not write it as a consecutive coherent story, rather as a collection of essays. Only at the very end of  the entire book does the conclusion become apparent: the whole remembrance of  things past has an inner logic – a logic that is only visible retrospectively. That is the moment when human lives emerge as biographies. As you can see, I am not able to respond to your question in a way you would like me to. For many, many years now, twenty odd years, each time I started a new topic I entered the same room, but I entered the room through dif ferent doors. This is not my own metaphor, I borrowed it from Gustav Ichheiser, one of  the most brilliant psychologists associated with Karl Mannheim. He was particularly concerned with the relative character of  human perception and interaction. He uses the metaphor of  the room and the many

26

A conversation with Zygmunt Bauman

doors. The first time I entered was with Legislators and Interpreters, which is concerned with how the role of intellectuals changed in the course of modern history – and I have been revisiting this room all the way up to more recent works such as Liquid Fear, a book on the volatility of postmodern societies.1 With regard to my book on the Holocaust, for example, I read [my wife] Janina’s book first and what I learned from it I then started investigating in sociological terms.2 What emerged was the idea that we have to analyse the Holocaust within the framework of a wider picture – modernity and its obsessions and continuities. Do you think there is a Polish or Central European theme in how and what you write? This is inevitable, and it would be dishonest of me to deny it. Most of it, however, only half-conscious. In particular the figure of  the stranger and the notion of exclusion can be related to a certain migration background. I think it is in a way an extrapolation of experience. Strangers are also the ones who ask the ‘wrong’ questions. They are both detached from society yet also closer to the innermost social mechanisms. The stranger is not concerned in the same way as others with social changes. In current western societies, many situations show a move from the Heideggerian category of zuhanden [ready-to-hand] to that of vorhanden [present-at-hand]: suddenly people realize that the things they were used to, for example the feeling of  belonging to a Gemeinschaft, are not there any more, they have dematerialized, turned abstract. I suspect there is an original configuration of a stranger as an indicator of  this shift from zuhanden to vorhanden. Contradicting Max Weber, I would say that modernity does not follow the principle of disenchanting but rather of enchanting reality: things are

1 2

Zygmunt Bauman, Legislators and Interpreters: On Modernity, Post-modernity and Intellectuals (Cambridge: Polity, 1989); Liquid Fear (Cambridge: Polity, 2006). Janina Bauman, Winter in the Morning: A Young Girl’s Life in the Warsaw Ghetto and Beyond, 1939–45 (London: Virago, 1986).

From Ethics to Justice

27

perpetually turned problematic; they are enchanted by being displaced and taken out of  their familiar context. The paradigmatic third agent for you seems to be the stranger, as described by Georg Simmel – ‘the person who comes today and stays tomorrow’.3 He is an agent who encounters both hospitality and hostility; he or she is socially neither included nor excluded. Why has this figure been so productive in modern self-ref lection? Modernity is up in arms against tradition – anything that is self-evident, ‘absolute’ and inert – and so is the stranger; with tradition he or she wants to break, with anything ‘absolute’ he or she has to break. For the sheer wish to accommodate and live in peace, strangers can’t but ask the incongruous questions that make the invisible visible and the indubitable controversial. In consequence, by design or by default, strangers act as the yeast of modern life – for that reason they are as much hated as they are indispensable. Does the stranger, in Simmel’s sense, automatically have the privilege of a higher degree of objectivity? Indeed, ‘objectivity’ is a dif ficult concept. We have to begin with the concept of  truth, which I think we can do without. It always leads to the idea of conquest. Odo Marquard once remarked that the German word Zweifel (doubt) derives from the notion of duplicity – dialogue, struggle, encounter. This is opposed to the conquest mentality, the tertium non datur, the law of  the excluded middle, etc. This concept of conversation rather than objectivity can, however, lead to discoveries, revelations, retrospective insights. Accordingly, Simmel’s stranger is both in a privileged and an underprivileged position. He is excluded from many important social interactions, yet he understands them more objectively.

3

Georg Simmel, ‘The Stranger’, in Werner Sollors, ed., Theories of  Ethnicity: A Classical Reader (New York: New York University Press, 1996), 37–42, here 37.

28

A conversation with Zygmunt Bauman

What allows us to address Simmel’s stranger as a paradigmatic figure of modernity rather than a historical self-ref lection of assimilated Jewry in late 19thcentury Central Europe? I don’t see the two propositions as mutually exclusive. In Europe, the Jew was the paradigmatic stranger. The two histories – of  Jews and of strangers – run parallel. In Europe, I would go as far as to say that the experience acquired along the Jew-Gentile interface, and particularly the early modern exit of  Jews from the ghetto, served as the crucible in which the homunculus called ‘stranger’ was synthesized – though once that had been done it could be settled in all sorts of areas, and not necessarily in terms of ethnicity. In your investigation of ambivalence in modernity you discuss the three terms pharmakon, hymen, supplement introduced into the discussion by Jacques Derrida. In what ways do they ref lect social mechanisms in modernity? 4 They wink to so many of modernity’s defining features … To ubiquitous and obstinate ‘undecidables’: risks, uncertainties, and above all that impossibility to stay still to which I refer in the concept of  liquidity; to the promotion of  the ‘betwixt and between’ state, in Victor Turner’s terms, from the transitory to the perennial condition and from temporary irritant to sought-after status; to nomads, refugees, exiles, diaspora communities, all becoming emblematic figures of modernity. Earlier on you mentioned your study Legislators and Interpreters. There you analyse the role of  the intellectual as shifting from legislators in the 18th century to interpreters in postmodernity. Does this ref lect a shift from shaping reality to ref lecting reality, the shift from a prime agent to a meta-ref lexive agent between the three Kantian realms of science, law and aesthetics?

4

Cf. Jacques Derrida, ‘Dif férance’, in Margins of  Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: The University of  Chicago Press, 1982), 1–28.

From Ethics to Justice

29

It means, primarily, the decoupling of intellectuals from the people. Or, to say much the same, abandoning by the learned classes of  the proselytizing mission they assigned to themselves at the start of  the modern nationstate-building process – the mission of  the enlighteners of  the ‘enlightened despots’ expected and nudged to legislate ‘the people’ into humanity, however the latter was defined. The withdrawal from these ambitions is intimately linked to two reasons. First, the shrinking potency and fading ambitions of  the state: crumbling of  the institutional anchorage for the models of  ‘good’ (humane) society; and second, the recognition of (or resigned surrender to) the steadfastness and permanence, for all practical intents and purposes, of multiculturality and multivocality. Hence the shift of intellectual focus to communication, language, conversation, hermeneutics, translation, deconstruction etc. Hence the self-defined role of intellectuals as mediators, go-betweens, guides and/or counsellors, translators, cultural brokers. Two major developments are, according to your investigation, tied up with this shift in the social and political role of  the intellectual, namely the emergence of  the notion of culture in the late 18th century and the idea of autonomous art. In what ways have these developments shaped our understanding of modernity? The essence of modernity is compulsive and obsessive modernization, and the shape and understanding of modernity are the prime objects of modernization. Modernity can only be grasped as a process and in statu nascendi. Its condition is perpetually noch nicht geworden [not yet come into being]. All ‘understandings of modernity’ are therefore merely careerreports or mid-career biographies. I believe the realization of  that truth of modernity signifies the ‘maturation of modernity’, seeing through its youthful illusions, naivety and excessive self-confidence; in short, the passage from the ‘in itself ’ to ‘for itself ’ condition, from the status of zuhanden to vorhanden. Or, to put the same in a dif ferent conceptual framework, from the solid to the liquid stage.

30

A conversation with Zygmunt Bauman

The rise of  the intellectual as an interpreter is also related to a reassessment of  hermeneutics in a culture of immediacy. How has that shaped recent social theories and praxes? It seems that the major change here is the perception of  hermeneutical activity as such. With Schleiermacher hermeneutics took of f, aiming to fight and defeat ‘misunderstanding’ – that is, assuming one true meaning besieged by a multitude of erroneous ones. This is an elaboration on Francis Bacon’s declaration of war on ‘idols’ barring true knowledge. At the other end of  transformation, there is the emphatic denial of  ‘one and only meaning’ and more generally the re-deployment of  hermeneutics as an infinite and dialogical, that is to say, open-ended, process of re-interpretation. Many contemporary intellectuals seem to be caught in a double-bind: by deconstructing the great narratives of  the western tradition they run the risk of reducing reality to simulation, by defending the autonomy of art they promote power structures irreconcilable with their political credo. Can this vacillating position be addressed as a deliberate self-legitimizing strategy? ‘Solid’ modernity melted the solids in order to replace them with solids more solid and resistant to melting. Liquid modernity melts solids in order to replace them with solids more f lexible and easier to melt. Liquid modernity stands out by the reversal of value hierarchy: elevation of  transience over durability. Interplay of composition and decomposition goes on as before, but the entities are composed with a ‘use by’ date and ‘until further notice’ clause. Nothing is expected, nor desired, to last – except change, temporariness, options wide open. Do intellectuals in the light of what you sketched out in your publication on Wasted Lives: Modernity and its Outcasts have to rethink their positions as ‘interpreters’ and strive for an ethical profile? 5

5

Zygmunt Bauman, Wasted Lives: Modernity and Its Outcasts (London: Blackwells, 2003).

From Ethics to Justice

31

There is a fundamental distinction to be made between being responsible to and being responsible for. The latter means to give something without expecting anything in return. The point is, however, that this is an attitude you cannot teach. You cannot teach altruism. When I wrote Holocaust and Modernity I came across a book by Nechama Tec, very substantial research on people who helped Jews in the Holocaust.6 What the analysis shows is illuminating: there was no correlation whatsoever between deeds and political attachment, religious creed, social background – nothing. Some people helped, because they were moral, other people did not help, because they were not moral – that’s it. What I do suspect is that the context into which these people are put makes a certain behaviour more likely than another. Belonging to the ‘educated’ class – I prefer the term ‘knowledge class’ – does not imply an ethical attitude. Probably precisely because of  this, we are currently experiencing a debate about a so-called ‘ethical turn’ in the humanities and social sciences. Do you see such a development? I cannot see it happening. Intellectuals in ‘solid modernity’ still believed that there is such a thing as ‘good society’ and the only trouble is finding the methods and tools for turning it real. We are talking about a dif ferent situation in ‘liquid modernity’, when everything is ‘until further notice’. People don’t believe in duration or eternity any longer – they don’t care about it. There is not even the idea of progress any longer. If you talk of  ‘progress’ in the current context, it is only in the sense that you will be left behind unless you modernize yourself. So better hurry up, hurry up, hurry up. Under these conditions – what does Sartre’s projet de la vie mean to people anymore? Thinking about a vocation becomes objectively dif ficult in our present social environment.

6

Nechama Tec, When Light Pierced the Darkness: Christian Rescue of  Jews in NaziOccupied Poland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986).

32

A conversation with Zygmunt Bauman

A leitmotif in your writings is the scandal of ambivalence.7 Why do you place such a prominent emphasis on this aspect in your genealogy of modernity? Perpetuity of ambivalence is closely related to that composition-decomposition dialectics. Ambivalence means uncertainty and impaired decisionmaking, it hence functions also as a trigger of remedial measures, perceived as imposition of order into chaos. But order-building can be compared to operating stage-lights: shifting them pulls some parts of  the stage out of darkness only by removing other parts from sights. Each anti-ambivalence therapy results in new ambivalences. The restlessness of  Weltanschauungen, social forms, human relations, identity construction etc. may be traced to that self-resurrecting capacity of ambivalence. It is, in turn, rooted in the essential non-commensurability of reality and its language-mediated representation. Is the mutual dependency of structure and chaos, conclusiveness and inconclusiveness, order and ambivalence germane to any culture at any given time? What makes it so important for modernity? Remember Lévy-Bruhl and his once tremendously inf luential idea of  the ‘savage mind’ – savage because it allows us to hold simultaneously two logically incompatible beliefs and thus neglect the ‘modern mind’s’ ban on contradiction? Lévy-Bruhl’s idea may be read as a manifesto against the modern declaration of war on all cultures that placidly accept living with ambivalence.8 There is nothing particularly modern about ambivalence. War, forever waged and never to be won, against ambivalence, however, is exquisitely modern. Though, as Edmund Leach pointed out, analysing the phenomena of  ‘profanity’, ‘obscenity’ or ‘animal abuse’, when fighting ambivalence we, the moderns, deploy the weapons of  ‘taboo’ practised by

7 8

Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and Ambivalence (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991). See Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, The Savage Mind (Chicago: The University of  Chicago Press, 1968).

From Ethics to Justice

33

all cultures to stif le, move out of sight or detoxicate ambivalence, with or without overt declaration of war.9 Isn’t the emphasis on transience a perpetual revaluation of values which can be extremely violent and ‘solid’? I am thinking of clashes between ‘liquid’ western modernity and indigenous cultures, between global market strategies and traditional pockets of  barter trade, be it in Latin America, Africa or the Muslim world. Globalization is not unifying the world; it’s all about dividing the world. There is a major split between the elites and the rest. In ‘solid modernity’ the elites and the rest were both enclosed in the same framework. When Henry Ford doubled the wages of  the workers, he also did that out of selfinterest. The owner and the workers were mutually dependent – they were doomed to coexist. It’s like marriage: there is a lot of conf lict, but there is also a genuine and sincere ef fort to arrive at some kind of modus vivendi. The big dif ference today is that the elite and the non-elite live in dif ferent universes. They meet in shops, restaurants, probably even hotels, but apart from that they are not fixed to the same territory and fate. One of  the most important stratifying factors today is the degree of mobility. The quicker you pass the passport control at the airport, the higher you are up. The communication between these two universes is at stake today. There are people who permanently enjoy this social mobility, this unfixedness, this undeterminedness, and then there are people who are barred these opportunities. And these people make a weapon out of  this barred opportunity. As much as ‘liquid modernity’ is a process of individualism, in the same way it is the breeder and cultivator of  fundamentalisms. It is a battle between security and freedom. Americans, for example, have the mobility of money and a military machinery, they can bribe or bombard. The other side, the terrorists, don’t have these means, but they have the power

9

See Edmund Leach, ‘Anthropological Aspects of  Language: Animal Categories and Verbal Abuse’, Anthrozoos 2/3 (1964), 151–65.

34

A conversation with Zygmunt Bauman

of nuisance. And they have the power of ultimate territorial mobility; they move in groups of one, two, three, they are untraceable. In doing so they can actually count on the mobilization of  the resources of  the other side. By only one terrorist atrocity there will be repercussions that are barely known or understood by the af fected country – from the challenges for the whole infrastructure to the psychology of conspiracy theories. Giorgio Agamben introduced the notion of  the homo sacer into political and philosophical debate. Homo sacer is an ancient legal term that describes the legal status of absolute deprivation, a state outside secular and religious law. The exclusion of  homines sacri serves the sovereign as an opportunity for reinstating the (perceived) legitimacy of certain power structures. To what extent does this figure ref lect your family of  ‘undecidables’, mentioned above? Inclusion and exclusion to a large extent overlap – in time and space. Few inclusions are complete and all-embracing, and cases of exclusion fall into many grades. Homo sacer is, as Weber would put it, an ‘ideal type’, which like all other ideal types condenses and magnifies traits too diluted in real specimens to be noted without that ideal type’s help. In the ancient Mediterranean, the idea of  homo sacer was extrapolated from the practice of ostracism from the polis (remember that gods were then also local); being homo sacer meant social death. Socrates, as you know, preferred hemlock. Applied to current practices, the idea incorporated a large and variegated family of cases of wildly dif ferentiated degrees of radicalism. Without Botany Bays, Devil Islands or Siberias, most homines sacri stay in the homeland. The practice of gas chambers and tribal genocides transcends in my view the semantic capacity of  homo sacer; refugees in camps come close to its original meaning; numerous cases of  ‘internal exile’, to which it is now fashionable to apply that term, stop well short of  that meaning. Within this shift from dyad to triad, which you sketched out above and which recurs as a theme throughout your work, is there any notion of identity which is preserved or reinvigorated?

From Ethics to Justice

35

I would put it metaphorically again: ‘identity from the shop’ versus ‘identity from the larder’. In the shop you can perpetually change your identity – being one and new again all the time. As opposed to the nine lives of cats, humans think they can have more than that. This kind of identity is constantly renegotiable. Then, however, there are boutiques which don’t admit anyone from the streets and there are people who cannot af ford changing their identities in shops. What they can do is go to the larder and switch on yesterday’s laptop or dress themselves up in last year’s fashion. What I mean is they are falling back on tradition and chauvinism. In our part of  the world or global village this traditionalist reaction is safely channelled away from the main street – for example into the world cup. This is a carnival ef fect: on Sunday you are looking for identity in the larder, on workdays you shop, if you can, in the High Streets for identities. Identities are no longer given, they are attached: there is no determination which overrides your choices, even if  they are limited to the larder. However, the question of identity is dominated by the fact that you have to have and forge for yourself an identity. In a census in Poland after World War II one million people regarded themselves as ‘locals’ rather than defining themselves by nationality or ethnicity. These people did not understand that one could choose between being, say, Belarusian or Pole. That has completely changed. If you claim today that you are the descendant of  Genghis Khan as opposed to, say, a fan of  the Beatles, it is your decision. The two forms of identities – from the shop and from the larder – and their combinations are also duties. Identity is not something society gives you, it is rather something you have to give to society. Let us return to our initial point of departure. In what ways is modern cultural theory marked by configurations of  the third? Georg Simmel considered in very general terms the dif ference between dyad and triad. The appearance of  the third is an evolutionary moment. Emmanuel Levinas was concerned with this moment in his later work, too. His original concern is the moral party of  two – I and the other. The presence of  the other forces me to conduct myself as a moral person; you are permanently faced with the dichotomy good versus evil with regard to

36

A conversation with Zygmunt Bauman

your actions. The responsibility is unlimited and unconditional. As soon as a third agent appears, you are confronted with a dif ferent set of problems: there are automatically shifting coalitions. When you have three, it is a question of comparing one other with a dif ferent other, and they also might have conf licts between themselves. However, once a third agent emerges, issues of justice replace moral issues. And it does not matter whether this third agent appears in the form of one, one thousand or one billion – the third stands for society. Levinas in his late work was obsessed with how to translate his ideas on the challenge of  the Other into the language of multitude. I think he died unsatisfied and did not solve the problem. Once you translate the issue of morality into the issue of justice, then ethics is replaced by politics. If we agree with this idea of justice replacing ethics, there is no politics of movement, which means politics defined by a final destination, a ‘perfect’ society against which you check all social and political action: the purpose justifies the means. The opposite term, politics of campaign, is related to fighting for and securing rights on a local basis by addressing one particular and concrete form of injustice. I am talking about partial little campaigns in which you confront one particular ‘evil’ without even understanding the injustice of  the whole picture. ‘Just’ society is not a fixed model enforced in the name of  humanity; ‘just’ society, in my view, is simply a society which does not believe it is just enough. The two interviews combined here were conducted with Zygmunt Bauman by Bernhard Malkmus in Leeds in December 2005 and July 2006.

Ulrich Bröckling

Governing by Triangulation: On Mediation

I Mediation is a social technology of conf lict management in which a neutral third party becomes involved. This third agent supports the disputing parties in negotiating terms of an agreement and finding a solution; however, he or she does not possess the ability to rule over the conf lict. It is the goal of  this process, in which all parties participate, to regulate the conf lict amicably through exploring the possibilities of negotiation and searching for new solutions. The outcome is then put on record in a written agreement, to which the signing parties fully commit themselves. Participation in a mediation process is on a voluntary basis. However, not participating in or dropping out of  the negotiations can lead to a situation in which the conf lict is not decided by those personally af fected through a process of negotiating and consensus-building. In such cases, it is solved through a judicial decision or the intervention of an interested third party – something similar to a teacher in the playground or a great military power in the case of cross-national disputes. Mediation aims at a side-ef fect beyond the settlement of  the immediate clash. It aims to mobilize the experiences of  the parties’ individual interests, needs, and emotions, to allow the dif ferent sides, through developing self-confidence and receiving attention, to enhance their ability to carry out conf licts in a self-determined way.1 1

Cf. the definition of  Christoph Besemer, Mediation. Vermittlung in Konf likten (Königsfeld: Werkstatt für Gewaltfreie Aktion, Stiftung Gewaltfreies Leben, 1999). Saadia Touval and I. William Zartman, ‘Introduction, Mediation in Theory’ in

38

Ulrich Bröckling

Mechanisms that are similar to mediation as a mode of regulating conf licts can be found in virtually every society. Since the mid-1960s it has been developed, primarily in the USA, as an institutional provision with specific methods, individual training programmes and the systematic production of  knowledge. Since then, mediation techniques have become established instruments especially in cases of separation and divorce consultation, but also in conf licts regarding the environment, in violenceprevention programmes for young people, in the economic arena, and finally within the framework of criminal law (victim-of fender-mediation). There is a booming market, in which professional conf lict managers regularly work on mediating such cases, or of fer training courses for volunteer ‘conf lict troubleshooters’. Ethnological, religious and historical studies have unearthed a variety of examples for the institution of a neutral mediator, in whom the role of  the arbitrator (the one who arbitrates the parties in a binding manner), and the role of  the mediator (the one who supports the parties in seeking an amicable solution), are often not clearly separated.2 The American cultural anthropologist Elman R. Service even sees the origin of political institutions as an instance of something that stands over and above the parties, as an ‘engineering of consent’.3 His theory runs as follows: in the

2

3

Touval and Zartman, eds, International Mediation in Theory and Practice (Boulder: Westview Press, 1985), 7. Christa Pelikan, ‘Über Mediationsverfahren’, in Pelikan, ed., Mediationsverfahren: Horizonte, Grenzen, Innenansichten (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 1999), 11–28. Cf. among others Christine B. Harrington, ‘Delegalization Reform Movements: A Historical Analysis’, in Richard L. Abel, ed., The Politics of  Informal Justice, vol. 1 (New York: Academic Press, 1982), 35–71. Sally Engle Merry, ‘The Social Organization of  Mediation in Non-Industrial Societies: Implications for Informal Community Justice in America’, in Abel, ed., The Politics of  Informal Justice, vol. 2 (New York: Academic Press, 1982), 17–45. Kevin Avruch, Peter W. Black and Joseph A. Scimecca, eds, Conf lict Resolution: Cross-Cultural Perspectives (New York: Greenwood Press, 1991). George S. Odiorne, ‘Arbitration and Mediation among the Early Quakers’, Arbitration Journal 9 (1956), 161–6. Elman Service, Origins of  the State and Civilization. The Process of  Cultural Evolution (New York: W.W. Norton, 1975), 12.

Governing by Triangulation: On Mediation

39

case of a conf lict, authorities in a segmented society must prevent the cycle of injury and revenge from spinning, and ultimately escalating, into one (giant) vendetta that involves the entire community. The first stable hierarchies and political of fices are developed where personal charisma no longer suf fices in the arbitration between conf licting parties: ‘A large and essential part of  the evolution of political organization is simply an extension and intensification of peace-making means.’4 For Georg Simmel, who dedicates a section of  his Soziologie to the ‘quantitative determination of group divisions’, the non-party or mediator constitutes the paradigmatic figure of  the third party. He subtly describes the de-escalating dynamic that the insertion of a neutral, third instance can ef fect: The non-partisan shows each party the claims and arguments of  the other; they thus lose the tone of subjective passion which usually provokes the same tone on the part of  the adversary. What is so often regrettable here appears as something wholesome, namely, that the feeling which accompanies a psychological content when one individual has it, usually weakens greatly when it is transferred to a second. […] Here we have a phenomenon which is very significant for the development of purely psychological inf luences. A third mediating social element deprives conf licting claims of  their af fective qualities because it neutrally formulates and presents these claims to the two parties involved. Thus this circle that is fatal to all reconciliation is avoided: the vehemence of  the one no longer provokes that of  the other, which in turn intensifies that of  the first, and so forth, until the whole relationship breaks down. Furthermore, because of  the non-partisan, each party to the conf lict not only listens to more objective matters but is also forced to put the issue in more objective terms than it would if it confronted the other without mediation.5

Referees and mediators, both foundational forms of  the non-partisan third, make up the binding element between the parties, but their role is also one of interruption. By generating a discontinuity in the thick sequence of reactions, they bring to a standstill the conf lictual dynamic that links the two opposing sides in a potentially deadly symbiosis. The process of 4 Service, Origins of  the State and Civilization, 61. 5 Georg Simmel, ‘The Quantitative Aspect of  the Group’ in Kurt H. Wolf f, ed., The Sociology of  Georg Simmel (Glencoe, IL: The Free Press, 1950), 147.

40

Ulrich Bröckling

mediation (comparable to the one of arbitration) ‘thus shows upon closer inspection a double structure, which corresponds in a particular way to the “double life” of  the third party: separation and binding do not present a contradiction for the mediator, because he indeed separates in order to bind (or, conversely, he leads the disputing parties together in order to separate them and to interrupt the escalation between them).’6 However, like mediators, arbiters embody dif ferent instances of a generalized third: whereas the judge represents the law by applying it to a concrete case, and thus at the same time produces justice because ‘application’ also always means ‘interpretation’, and a moment of decision always inheres in his judgment, the mediator represents and institutes the law to a lesser extent. Rather, he represents and institutes the ideal of understanding and the rationality of  the process of understanding.

II As an example of conf lict mediation through a third instance, Simmel mentions the model of  the English ‘boards of conciliation’, in which representatives of workers and businesses negotiated tarif f agreements under a third, independent chairman.7 However, the decisive impulses for the development of  the theory and praxis of mediation in today’s understanding did not emerge from the institutionalized regulation of  tarif f controversies. Rather, they derived from (1) organization theory, (2) research in political conf lict, (3) the work of religious groups motivated by atonement, particularly the Quakers and Mennonites. They also emerged (4) from the polyphonic movement of criticizing the American legal system, which has led to the

6 7

Albrecht Koschorke, ‘Vermittlung und Unterbrechung: Das Dritte als Institution’, paper delivered at the 32nd congress of  the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Soziologie, Munich, 7 October 2004. Simmel, ‘Quantitative Aspect of  the Group’, 147.

Governing by Triangulation: On Mediation

41

establishing of numerous Neighborhood Justice Centers and Community Mediation Centers.8 The common background to these heterogeneous endeavours was the loss of  legitimization of instances and mechanisms of conf lict that had been established by society. Among other things, these instances and mechanisms had been criticized for their inef ficiency, hierarchical structures, bureaucratic formalism, their role in the cementing of social inequality, fixation on the state, and an incapacitation of  those af fected. I would like to trace out these four genealogical lines in more detail: (1) Classical organization theory defined conf licts as system pathologies, as burdensome disturbances of  functions which were to be shut down – or at least mitigated – by means of appropriate, i.e. stronger, struggle-oriented or compromise-oriented interventions, depending upon the situation and power relations. In contrast to this, Mary Parker Follett, a pioneering management theorist, called attention to the productive potential of conf licts as early as during the 1920s. She demanded: ‘as conf lict – dif ference – is here in the world, as we can not avoid it, we should, I think, use it’.9 She suggested that conf licts be understood as the meeting of dif ferent interests and convictions. They should be solved not through ‘domination’ or ‘compromise’ but by means of  ‘integration’, when at all possible. Anticipating what game-theorists would later call the transformation of a zero-sum game into a win-win situation, she wrote, ‘when two desires are integrated, that means a solution has been found in which both desires have found a place, that neither side has had to sacrifice anything.’10 It was not until the 1960s that researchers began to look systematically for techniques to regulate conf licts that promised more sustainable 8 9 10

Cf. Joseph A. Scimecca, ‘Conf lict Resolution in the United States: The Emergence of a Profession?’, in Avruch, Black and Scimecca, eds, Conf lict Resolution: CrossCultural Perspectives, 19–39. Mary Parker Follett, ‘Constructive Conf lict’, in Henry C. Metcalf and Lyndall Urwick, eds, Dynamic Administration: The Collected Papers of  Mary Parker Follett (New York: Harper & Row, 1940), 30. Follett, ‘Constructive Conf lict’, 34.

42

Ulrich Bröckling

solutions than the struggle for victory or defeat, or the bargaining for compromises.11 From then on, it was not the conf lict itself  that appeared as a disruption, but every attempt to end it through an authoritarian decision for one party’s detriment. Instead of running after the unreachable ideal of a frictionless process, one tried to make the unavoidable energy produced by friction useful, and therefore to increase the ef ficiency of  the organization – ‘setting friction to work’, as Follet called it.12 Therefore it was necessary, firstly, to incorporate every party into the ef fort to settle the conf lict. Secondly, one had to discard the logic of  battle. According to the new creed, conf licts were no longer to be conceived along the lines of an antagonistic model of war and its continuation by means of politics, but rather as problems that could only be solved together. It was the task of a neutral mediator to smooth the way for this, to clear away blockades, and to provide the appropriate tools for the cooperative dealing with problems. Such a perspective was impressive not least because of  the implicit promise of egalitarian participation. Asymmetries of power were not denied, but they disappeared from the horizon when the parties found solutions to problems together, from which every side profits, even if not in equal measure. The decisive impulse that the theory of organization has contributed to the development of  the concept of mediation has been the recognition that conf licts need not be zero-sum games, and that their settlement does not necessarily exhaust itself in the distribution of gain and loss. (2) Those seminars in which British and US-American research groups contributed to the settling of international conf licts and civil wars were also committed to the problem-solving approach. At the same time, these research groups hoped to gain a deeper insight into the general dynamic of  these disputes. It was about the attempt to transfer representatives of a party that were participating in a conf lict into a quasi laboratory situation and there, under scientific guidance, to put a solution-oriented dialogue

11 12

Cf. especially Robert R. Blake, Herbert A. Shepard and Jane S. Mouton, Managing Intergroup Conf lict in Industry (Houston: Gulf  Publishing, 1964). Follett, ‘Constructive Conf lict’, 35.

Governing by Triangulation: On Mediation

43

into motion. John Burton called the first Problem-Solving Workshop, which he organized with his colleagues from the Centre for Conf lict Analysis in 1965, an experiment in ‘Controlled Communication’.13 The social psychologists Herbert C. Kelman and Stephen C. Cohen have sketched out the basic elements of  these workshops in the following way: representatives of conf licting national groups are brought together for face-to-face communication in a relatively isolated setting, free from governmental and diplomatic protocol. The basic format calls for more or less unstructured discussions, taking place in the presence and under the guidance of social scientists who are knowledgeable both about group process and about conf lict theory. Setting, agenda, ground rules, procedures, and third-party interventions are designed to counteract the accusatory, legalistic, and conf lict-expressive atmosphere that usually characterizes interactions between conf licting parties. They are to instead promote a task-oriented, analytical approach. Such an atmosphere, it is assumed, has the potential for producing changes in the participants’ perceptions and attitudes and thus for facilitating creative problem solving and conf lict resolution.14

To researchers involved in this issue, it has been clear from the beginning that international confrontation cannot be reduced to a mere deficit in communication. Consequently they also cannot be resolved if it is only

13

14

Cf. John Burton, Conf lict and Communication: The Use of  Controlled Communication in International Relations (London: Macmillan, 1969). Burton’s model of conf lict solution is based upon a theory of  human needs that is inf luenced by the psychologist Abraham H. Maslow and the socio-biologist Edward O. Wilson. An overview of  the – methodologically diverse – problem-solving workshops is given by Herbert C. Kelman, ‘The problem-solving workshop in conf lict resolution’, in Richard L. Merritt, ed., Communication in International Conf lict (Urbana: University of  Illinois Press, 1972), 168–204. Herbert C. Kelman and Stephen P. Cohen, ‘The ProblemSolving Workshop: A Social-Psychological Contribution to the Resolution of  International Conf licts’, Journal of  Peace Research 13 (1976), 79–90. Kelman and Cohen, ‘Reduction of  International Conf lict: An Interactional Approach’, in William G. Austin and Stephen Worchel, eds, The Social Psychology of  Intergroup Relations (Monterey: Brooks/Cole, 1979), 288–303. Barbara J. Hill, ‘An Analysis of  Conf lict Resolution Techniques. From Problem-Solving Workshops to Theory’, Journal of  Conf lict Resolution 26 (1982), 109–38. Kelman and Cohen, ‘The Problem-Solving Workshop’, 79.

44

Ulrich Bröckling

the conf licting parties who are gathered around the table, and who are given the experience of constructive conduct of conversation under scientific guidance. Likewise, workshops should not replace of ficial negotiations. Rather, they should generate the presuppositions for the opening of negotiations and supplement them in dif ficult phases. The decision to transfer such conf lict negotiations into a university setting was connected with a particular expectation: that the academic command of objective dispute, and the model of expert dialogue by the scientific community, would make it easier for the participants to give up patterns of communication that intensify conf lict, and trust themselves to the promises of rationality that come with scientific problem solving. By defining the pacification of violent controversies as if  they were a task to be approached with social-scientific instruments, the researchers involved have reclaimed their professional competence and inaugurated themselves as experts. Their understanding of  their role has ceased to correspond to that of  the classical political advisor or diplomatic negotiator. It has, rather, combined the role of  the communication coach with that of a catalyst. They have created a test arrangement, have taken care to keep to the basic rules, and have provided background knowledge on the theory of conf lict. Especially, however, they have observed the workshop-event and have passed on their second-order observations by of fering to define the situation to the participants. (3) Stronger than the social scientific mediators, pacifist religious communities such as the Quakers and the Mennonites are committed to non-staterun conf lict-resolution. Since their beginnings, these sects have sought distance from worldly governance, since the demands of  the state – especially regarding military service in war – has contradicted their understanding of  the Christian command to love your fellow human being. Instead of carrying internal conf licts to a state-run judge, they have developed the process of solving conf licts themselves through the members of  the congregation, and when at all possible without utilizing any means of coercion. Organization theorists who advocate a cooperative form of conf lict management, as well as the initiators of  the Problem-Solving Workshops argue in a utilitarian manner and in so doing have strengthened the technical-pragmatic side of  the process of mediation. In contrast to these, the

Governing by Triangulation: On Mediation

45

religious groups tend to emphasize the aspect of reconciliation between the disputing parties. Beyond the settlement of the concrete dispute itself, even if no settlement is reached, the process of mediation possessed an intrinsic value. It changed those involved and showed them the way to resolve conf licts without resorting to violence. The Quaker attitude of  ‘balanced partiality’15 has exercised a lasting inf luence upon the understanding of  the role of  the mediator. What constitutes a good mediator, as far as the parties in conf lict are concerned, is not only the virtue of neutrality, in the sense of an indif ferent equidistance towards the parties in conf lict. Rather, this mediator should equally turn towards each of  those involved, listen to them with empathy, and seek to understand their point of view. However, refraining from calling upon state authorities, and placing increased value upon the community, make clear that the religiously motivated conf lict mediators intend more than triggering individual learning processes. They also hope to reach a transformation of society as well. Their practice of nonviolent self-regulation is anti-state, but not in the sense of a struggle against the Leviathan. It is, rather, about making themselves independent from the state by transferring the task of establishing peace and the balancing out of conf licting interests from the government to the af fected individuals, that is, to the community. (4) The fourth and most important field, on the basis of which mediation in the USA has been built into an independent social technology, is characterized by the ambivalence between problem-solving-centred strategies and similar methods that target personal growth or social transformation: for example, the movement for Alternative Dispute Resolution.16 Under 15 16

C.M. Mike Yarrow, Quaker Experience in International Conciliation (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1978), 165. Cf. Richard L. Abel, ed., The Politics of  Informal Justice, vol. 1; Roman Tomasic and Malcolm M. Feeley, eds, Neighborhood Justice: Assessment of an Emerging Idea (New York: Longman, 1982); Jerold S. Auerbach, Justice without Law? Resolving Disputes without Lawyers (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983); Richard Hofrichter, Neighborhood Justice in Capitalist Society (Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing, 1987); Christine B. Harrington, Overview of  the Dispute Resolution Field (New York:

46

Ulrich Bröckling

this umbrella concept, a multitude of processes and institutions operate as extrajudicial dispute arbitrators. Along with divorce and custody cases, the Neighborhood Justice Centers and Community Mediation Centers mainly treat private matters of dispute, for example, between neighbours, tenants and landlords, customers and salespeople, as well as minor property and assault of fences. The impulse which has led to the construction of  the Alternative Dispute Resolution programme came partly from the judicial system itself, and partly out of  the social movements of  the 1960s and 1970s. Thus, from the beginning, conf licting motives have been superimposed upon one another; but they have also been conf lated. For some it is about lightening the burden for the courts, accelerating the judicial process, and lowering the costs, for others it is about seeking alternatives to a legal system that incapacitates its citizens, disadvantages ethnic minorities and the lower classes, and reinforces the political relations of power. For other groups, it is about utilizing consensual conf lict-solving techniques, because these techniques promote the social competence and the personal growth of  the individual. At least three dif ferent projects are tied to Community Mediation.17 First, it entails a project of judicial reform, which aims to streamline the dispensation of justice according to economically ef ficient criteria. Towards this goal, they want to transfer the arbitration of minor disputes to extrajudicial authorities. This is characterized by their lower barriers to access, their social proximity, and their striving for amicable solutions to conf lict. The diversification of services ought to allow for dif ferent forms and dimensions of problems, and at the same time guarantee citizen-friendliness, like the rational allocation of  legal resources.

17

Report for the Ford Foundation, 1986); Christin B. Harrington and Sally Engle Merry, ‘Ideological Production: The Making of  Community Mediation’, Law & Society Review 22 (1988), 709–35; Laura Nader ‘The ADR Explosion – The Implications of  Rhetoric in Legal Reform’, Windsor Yearbook of  Access to Justice 8 (1988), 269–91. Cf. Harrington and Merry, Ideological Production; Stephan Breidenbach, Mediation (Cologne: Otto Schmidt, 1995), 116f f., dif ferentiates between five projects: (1) Service-Delivery-Project, (2) Access-to-Justice-Project, (3) Individual-AutonomyProject, (4) Reconciliation-Project, (5) Social-Transformation-Project.

Governing by Triangulation: On Mediation

47

Second, it entails a project of societal change that wants to replace state controls through self-governance of  the participants, and understands mediation as a way to prepare a grassroots democracy. The experience of  being able to settle conf licts independently from state-run institutions in a self-responsible manner, and in some cases with support from a mediator from the local neighbourhood, is supposed to help overcome political apathy and strengthen the active ties within the community. This is here brought into use as an antidote against the powers of social atomization and disintegration. Third, and finally, it entails a project of personal development, which pushes the mediation process nearer to a therapeutic experience. At the heart of  this project lies the aspect of empowerment: that the individuals involved do not only have the opportunity to present their view of  the problem and to hear out those of  the other side, but rather – in contrast to in a court proceeding – to also decide for themselves whether they will agree, or in some cases, which settlement they will agree to. Through this process, their verbalization and ability to empathize should also improve. Further alternatives to the use of violence or resignation should be provided, and their self-confidence, as well as their self-respect should increase. The boundaries between these three avenues are anything but distinct. They are seen most clearly based on the greater or smaller distance from the state legal system. Mediation appears in one instance as a cost-ef fective supplement, and in another instance as a model for a political alternative, or in yet another instance as a psychologically advantageous alternative to court proceedings. The spectacular ascent of  the Community Mediation programmes has led, however, to the hopes for social reform and therapylike solutions wearing thin. With increasing professionalization, and the financial necessities that come with it, those pragmatic strategies which have remained closely tied to the courts and have formed manifold hybrid forms between judicial decisions and mediation, have gained the upper hand.

48

Ulrich Bröckling

Early on, critics were already pointing out power-preserving ef fects of  the Neighborhood Justice movement.18 Despite the counter views of at least the protagonists of  the Social Transformation approach, according to the critics, the partial substitution of  the dispensation of justice by alternative processes of conf lict control have refined the mechanisms of social control. They have also been extended into the area of everyday life, which until now has remained out of reach of state interference. Expressed as a formula: less law means more control.19 This expansion of state-authority through non-state means, the critics continue, has disguised itself in perfidious manner as the emancipatory garb of a consensual, participatory and voluntary process. As much as these mainly Marxist-based analyses have keenly worked out the ideological moment behind the corresponding projects of  the Community Mediation, their attempt to identify a hegemonial programme or even a targeted strategy of manipulation by the capitalist, class-based state has failed to convince. Because the critics themselves remain fixated upon the state, they are not able to explain why such contradictory motives and ideas about the goal can be connected precisely to a technology like mediation, which has not feigned consensus, participation and voluntariness, but rather mobilized resources. Stimulation rather than simulation has been the battle-cry of responsible and active citizens, who are at the same time capable of compromise and cooperation, and has been the political programme uniting the heterogeneous currents of  the Alternative Dispute Resolution.

18 19

Cf. especially Abel, ed., The Politics of  Informal Justice; Hofrichter, Neighborhood Justice. Cf. ibid., 88f.

Governing by Triangulation: On Mediation

49

III We have got used to thinking about the present economization of  the social sphere exclusively under the perspectives of competitive relations, increased through globalization, and the break-up of a socialist-state security system. The popular talk of  ‘unfettered capitalism’ (Bourdieu), ‘predator capitalism’ (Ziegler) or the ‘terror of  the economy’ (Forrester) suggest the collapse of political order and a return to an anarchist war of everyone against everyone, the taming of which requires a strong state, citizen engagement, or even an institutionalized global citizenship.20 A technology like mediation fits poorly into this image. The boom of a process which is based upon consensus instead of struggle, upon autonomous regulation of conf licts instead of sovereign dispensation of justice, awakes doubts about a diagnosis of  the present that imagines a Hobbesian scenario. A new mode of regulation corresponds much more to the de-regulation that is lamented from all sides: namely, the withdrawal of  the state is accompanied by the construction of individual and community-related potential for self-governance. The return of war – as a social fact as well as a generalized metaphor of  the social – is f lanked by the practices and rhetoric of pacification. The suggestive power of mediation rests not least upon the fact that it couples the ethos of  the consensual balance of interests with the argument of cost-savings. In this way, in the case of conf licts about the environment, mediation ought to increase not only ‘the probability of an environmentally sustainable solution’ and ‘work against the widespread political sullenness’. But it should also avoid interminable legal disputes, and improve the ‘acceptance of a collectively-found solution’.21 In other words, mediation’s power of suggestion ought to minimize every loss due to friction, which in economic terms, are booked as transaction costs. And what helps to

20 Cf. Pierre Bourdieu, Counterfire: Against the Tyranny of  the Market (London: Verso 2003); Viviane Forrester, The Economic Terror (Cambridge: Polity, 1999); Jean Ziegler, La faim dans le monde expliquée à mon fils (Paris: Seuil, 2000). 21 Thomas Barbian, ‘Mediation bei Umweltkonf likten’, Sowi 22/3 (1993), 160–8.

50

Ulrich Bröckling

mitigate controversial mega-projects should also be able to arbitrate disputes between neighbours, divorces or conf licts between customers and suppliers with the smallest ef fort and the most sustainable results. Regardless of whether it is protagonists of mediation who recommend this as an inexpensive supplement, as a fundamental democratic alternative, or likewise, as a personality-promoting as well as community-establishing alternative, a court proceeding steadily serves them as a negative example: the general opposing concepts are consensus instead of confrontation, autonomy of party instead of court judgment, articulation and balance of genuine interests instead of assertion by dispensation of justice.22 The accusation runs as follows: whereas in court the parties struggle intransigently against one another because each one wants to get ‘their’ right, the process of mediation targets an amicable and therefore a more sustainable solution. Whereas a court trial releases the plaintif f as well as the defendant from the responsibility for the settlement of a conf lict, the process of mediation gives it back to them. Indeed, in democratic states, the laws come into being through parliamentary rules, and, at least according to pretence, everyone is equal before them. However, in the courtroom a constitutional monarchy continues to govern: the rules are established, an appeal is possible, but only one individual makes a decision. In contrast to this, the process of mediation transfers the republican principle of self-governance to the process of regulating the conf lict itself: every voice is heard, and everyone must come to an agreement. Whereas the judge, in the application of  his valid right, proclaims his judgment and lets this be implemented by means of coercion if necessary, the mediator acts solely as a catalyst and helps the concerned parties independently find a solution that is acceptable for everyone. Even exerting extreme caution, judges can make wrong decisions. Mediators, however, abstain from a decision and by doing so, paradoxically are always in the right: ‘A person who balances may not err; a person who helps others to find the balance themselves cannot err.’23 22 Pelikan, Über Mediationsverfahren, 11. 23 Wolfgang Hof fmann-Riem, ‘Mediation als moderner Weg zur Konf liktbewältigung’, in Jürgen Brand and Dieter Strempel, eds, Soziologie des Rechts. Festschrift für Erhard Blankenburg zum 60. Geburtstag (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 1998), 649–64, here 658.

Governing by Triangulation: On Mediation

51

Like the omnipresent counselling with its principles of voluntariness, openness to results, and help to self-help, mediation belongs to those security measures which build upon daily forms of  helping communication – in this case upon the arbitration of disputes. Mediation carries these forms of communication over into methodological, often professionally led and institutionally supported strategies of managing social risks. This is precisely the step from the technical to the technological, or the extension of  technical processes into systematic paradigms which carry scientific or institutional authority. Two opposing tendencies come together. On the one hand, the negotiation of conf licts is formalized. A new type of expert appears on the scene, who takes over the role of  the neutral third, and moderates the mediatory conversation according to established models of  the process. Such a regulated process comes out of a dispute and the successful or unsuccessful endeavours in its settlement. On the other hand, there is an impulse towards informalization. Whereas a judicial decision always forms the final stage of a court proceeding, in mediation it remains left to the disputing parties whether they will reach an agreement or not, and what this agreement will look like. A sovereign act with orders of process and the stages of appeal becomes a negotiation process with an open ending. The more or less subtle demand to sit at one table with the other parties of  the conf lict and to work towards a consensus replaces a judicial, coercive arbitration. The political rationality of mediation lies in this double movement: a broader, if only indirect guidance of social relationships by simultaneous retraction of sovereign forms of exercising power. Opposing the possibilities for participation stands a pressure to participate. Whoever declines to join in finds themselves very quickly branded as anti-democratic or barrater.24 This has been the case in a number of 24 Cf. Michael Wilk, ‘Technik des sozialen Friedens: “Beteiligung als Akzeptanz‑ management”’, in Joachim Bruhn, Manfred Dahlmann and Clemens Nachtmann, eds, Kritik der Politik (Freiburg: ça ira Verlag, 2000), 301–18; Detlef  Sack, ‘Globalisierung, politische Beteiligung und Protestmobilisierung. Zum Mediationsverfahren Flughafenerweiterung Frankfurt am Main’, in Ansgar Klein, Ruud Koopmans and Heiko Geiling, eds, Globalisierung. Partizipation. Protest (Opladen: Leske + Budrich, 2001), 293–317.

52

Ulrich Bröckling

citizens initiatives in mediation processes regarding the expansion of  the Frankfurt airport. For good reason, these citizens’ initiatives doubted the local government’s expressed policy of  being open to any results that might have come out of mediation processes that it had itself initiated.25 However, even where these citizen-led mediation processes do not degenerate into a mere process of  ‘acceptance-management’, mediation sets a frame in which dif ferent forms of antagonism either do not occur, or are quickly taken over through other communication. Passions are moderated so that interests can be mediated. Naturally, this does not always work, but it sets the direction in which the solution should be sought. If everyone is supposed to move towards each other at the same time, the probability is great that they meet each other half way. No one is obligated to go down this road. However, the price for those who refuse is high: it brings with it their exclusion from the community of good-willed individuals. If  the ideal of speaking to one another and arriving at an agreement with one another is anchored as a moral telos, then an interruption of  the conversation becomes an absolute sin. As a conclusion, once again, to highlight the dif ference between judge and mediator: the great third, embodied by the minor third, the mediator, is dif ferent from the great third, embodied by his antagonistic brother, the judge. It is not the law, it is communication. If  the judge acts as a mediator of sovereign power, then the sovereignty of  the mediator lies in the power of mediation.

25

See Wilk, ‘Technik des sozialen Friedens’.

Paul Stenner

Foundation by Exclusion: Jealousy and Envy

I.  Introduction: Foundation by exclusion ‘You can’t do that’, from the Beatles’ A Hard Day’s Night (1964), is one of several autobiographical songs written by John Lennon on the theme of jealousy. Attention to the lyrics shows an interesting connection between classical ‘romantic’ jealousy (Lennon goes ‘out of  his mind’ on ‘catching’ his loved one ‘talking to that boy again’) and a closely related ‘green’ emotion: envy (‘ev’ry body’s green, ‘cause I’m the one who won your love’). If we call Lennon the subject of jealousy and his loved one the object, then it seems that the figure of  the third person is complex in an interesting way. Specifically, the third figure might be the rival (‘that boy’), the envious observer (‘ev’rybody’), and/or the ridiculing observer (‘they’d laugh’, as the song says). Who is the third? That is the question. This dynamic complex of positions that f luctuate around the figure of  the third will form the empirical focus of  this chapter, but first it is necessary to take a detour around some general theoretical issues. What interests me both philosophically and scientifically about the notion of thirdness is something quite specific. It relates to a gesture of  thought characteristic of a number of significant twentieth- and twenty-first-century philosophers and scientists, including, amongst others, Serres, von Foerster, Luhmann, Agamben and Girard. Drawing particularly on the work of  Girard and Agamben, in the next sub-section I will describe this gesture of  thought as foundation by exclusion. In a cross-fertilization of  the work of  Serres and Luhmann, the following sub-sections will describe the logic that characterizes this gesture as paralogic, and emphasize two aspects of paralogic: interruption and mediation.

54

Paul Stenner

I.1.  Foundation by exclusion Foundation by exclusion expresses the idea of an intimate relationship between beginnings and exclusions or between identities and expulsions. It takes very seriously the notion that it is through a relation to the exclusion or expulsion of  ‘the third’ or of  ‘thirdness’ that unity and identity are created and maintained. The implication is that behind the foundation of something unified (something that might be described as a system) there lurks expulsion and exclusion, and that this exclusion is necessary (rather than incidental) to the ongoing constitution of  the system. I describe this point as general since, arguably, it applies whether we are dealing with a social group, a system of organized conscious experience, a system of  knowledge, or even a biological organism. Nevertheless, it is perhaps easiest to illustrate when we are dealing with extreme cases that relate to human social systems. Girard, for example, draws attention to the tendency for human collectives to form themselves around the figure of a scapegoat or sacrificial victim.1 Imagine a human collective in a state of disarray and perhaps internal tension. This might be as a result of  hardship, a natural disaster or some other event that has thrown the relations of  the group out of equilibrium. The group is in a muddle of disunity. In this state, Girard argues, it is likely that a scapegoat will be sought. That scapegoat will either be an outsider unlucky enough to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, or else a marginally placed insider. They will be broadly innocent, but will be blamed by the collective for the ills that are befalling it. Time and time again, Girard shows us, such scapegoats have been targeted by the group, blamed for the bad situation, and murdered or else violently expelled. Girard draws attention to the unifying ef fect of scapegoating: it can actually work to newly consolidate the collective. There is a shared object of attention, a shared evaluation of  blame, and a shared activity of violence. What was previously a group in disarray becomes a coherent collective with

1

René Girard, The Scapegoat (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), especially chapters 1 and 12.

Foundation by Exclusion: Jealousy and Envy

55

a shared focus, a shared desire and a shared course of action. The excluded victim in such a case is literally what the community has in common. In providing a shared object of in-group communication, the victim or scapegoat forms the foundation of  the community. In short, through the practice of scapegoating, Girard gives us a model of  how order can arise out of disorder through the exclusion of a third party. The history of  humankind told from the perspective of  foundation by exclusion is not a pretty sight. Behind the pride of a nation lurks the hostile exclusionism of racism. Behind the economic power of  the first world lurks the relentless exploitation of  the third. Behind the techno-scientific modernization of  the human social world lurks the systematic exploitation of  limited natural resources. These exclusions are not once-and-for-all events. The suf fering of  the excluded third is perpetual. As Agamben has argued, these excluded figures are actually better thought of, not simply as excluded, but as included as excluded.2 They are not just banished, never to be seen again, rather, they are still very much part of  the system, but the part that pays the costs. The system feeds of f  them as a parasite feeds of f its host. At the origin of politics Agamben finds the ban, and at the origin of  law, the exception to the rule. Inclusion is based upon exclusion, and the archaic Roman figure of  homo sacer symbolizes those whose inclusion through exclusion forms the basis of juridico-political systems. I.2. Paralogic In his book The Parasite, Serres develops, amongst many other things, the general notion of  ‘parasite logic’.3 To put it in a deceptively simple way, one could say that the exclusion of noise is a necessary moment in the closure of a system. Although generally applicable, this is most obvious in the com-

2 3

Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), particularly Sections 1 and 6 of  Part 2, and Section 7 of  Part 3. Michel Serres, The Parasite (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1982).

56

Paul Stenner

munication systems described by information theory. For a signal to pass along a channel from a sender to a receiver, noise must be excluded. Serres draws attention to the fact that, in French, the word parasite can also mean ‘noise’ or what in English we call ‘static’. Noise, for Serres, is the parasite or the excluded third which is strictly necessary if anything like a signal is to emerge and to pass from a first person to a second person. Noise, in other words, must be included as excluded, since successful transmission of a message depends upon the exclusion of  this parasite. Serres therefore views systems in general as being based or founded upon an excluded third. The parasite, being literally a figure ‘on the side’, is ‘always there; it is inevitable’.4 For this reason noise always returns to interrupt, like the burst of static that interrupts a radio broadcast. The relation adopted to this third figure of  the parasite thus becomes essential. It is apparent that this lends a thoroughgoing ambivalence to the ‘thirdness’ of noise, which Serres sums up neatly as follows: Theorem: noise gives rise to a new system, an order that is more complex than the simple chain. The parasite interrupts at first glance, consolidates when you look again … such a parasite is responsible for the growth of  the system’s complexity; such a parasite stops it … are we in the pathology of systems or in their emergence and evolution?5

Serres takes us into the cutting edge of  the theory of complex systems. The notion of order from noise, for example, is also a fundamental principle of  the cybernetician von Foerster, and it was developed by Atlan into the principle of complexity from noise.6 To grasp the idea of order or complexity from noise is to embrace a paradox of sorts. Noise when included as excluded is order.

4 5 6

Ibid., 62. Ibid., 14. Heinz von Foerster, Understanding Understanding: Essays on Cybernetics and Cognition (London: Springer-Verlag, 2003); Henri Atlan, ‘Hierarchical Self-organization in Living Systems: Noise and Meaning’, in Milan Zeleny, ed., Autopoiesis, a Theory of  Living Organizations (New York: North Holland, 1981).

Foundation by Exclusion: Jealousy and Envy

57

My suggested term ‘paralogic’7 combines Serres’ concept of  the parasite with Luhmann’s8 core concept of paradox,9 itself developed from earlier systems theory.10 In Luhmann’s systems theory, a paradox (which occurs when the conditions of possibility of an operation are also the conditions of its impossibility) is a logical perplexity that, as it were, paralyses autopoiesis, threatening to put a stop to the f low of ongoing communication that is the life-blood of  the social. Paradoxes ‘short-circuit’ processes of communication. But for Luhmann, paradox is far more than an irritating obstacle since it is also the generating principle of system formation and evolution. Each type of social system is hence, in Luhmann’s account, born from its grounding paradox. Hence the paradox of  law lies in the question of  the legality of  law itself (how does law establish its own legitimacy?); the paradox of power lies in its relation to violence (force must always be a possibility, but if it becomes actual, power is radically compromised); the paradox of scientific truth lies in the inaccessibility of perception to communication; the paradox of  love lies in its relation to sex, etc. More generally, in Luhmannian theory, communication itself is grounded in the paradox of  the radical inaccessibility to others of  the subjective conscious experience of psychic systems. For a system to continue it must temporarily de-paradoxify its grounding paradox, but paradox will always return to interrupt. Social systems are thus born from paradox, provoked into complexification by paradox, and inevitably return to paradox. Luhmann’s paradox and Serres’ parasite are hence directly comparable theoretical figures of  thirdness that together suggest a paralogic capable of 7

Paul Stenner, ‘Is Autopoietic Systems Theory Alexithymic? Luhmann and the SocioPsychology of  Emotions’, Soziale Systeme 10/1 (2004), 159–85. 8 Niklas Luhmann, Social Systems (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995). 9 C.f. Jean Clam, ‘The Specific Autopoiesis of Law: Between Derivative Autonomy and Generalized Paradox’, in Jiri Přibáň and David Nelken, eds, Law’s New Boundaries: The Consequences of  Legal Autopoiesis (Aldershot: Dartmouth Publishing Company, 2001) and Oren Perez and Gunther Teubner, eds, Paradoxes and Inconsistencies in the Law (Oxford: Hart, 2006). 10 E.g. Paul Watzlawick, Janet Beavin and Don Jackson, Pragmatics of  Human Communication: A Study of  Interactional Patterns, Pathologies, and Paradoxes (New York: Norton, 1967).

58

Paul Stenner

illuminating processes of  foundation by exclusion. However, before turning to jealousy and envy it is necessary to brief ly introduce two further concepts of relevance to this particular ‘paralogical’ concept of  thirdness: interruption and mediation. I.3.  Interruption and mediation The concept of interruption becomes particularly important when theorizing thirdness by way of paralogic. In Serres’ account, for example, parasitism is the principle of interruption or interception. In the following quotation he contrasts some familiar ways of approaching systems with an approach attuned to parasitism: Stations and paths together form a system. Points and lines, beings and relations. What is interesting might be the construction of  the system, the number and disposition of stations and paths. Or it might be the f low of messages passing through the lines … But one must write as well of  the interceptions, of  the accidents in the f low along the way between stations – of changes and metamorphoses. What passes might be a message but parasites (static) prevent it from being heard, and sometimes, from being sent … What travels along the path might be money, gold, or commodities, or even food – in short, material goods. You don’t need much experience to know that goods do not always arrive so easily at their destination. There are always interceptors who work very hard to divert what is carried along these paths. Parasitism is the name most often given to these numerous and diverse activities …11

There is in fact a strong tradition within psychology of conceiving human emotions as interruptions of sorts.12 Although this thesis can be overstated, it can also be productively understood on both psychological and social levels (although ultimately a psychosocial view is needed). On the ‘psychic’ level of subjective experience, emotions can interrupt the orderly f low of consciousness, realigning our orientation to the world, transforming our

11 Serres, The Parasite, 11. 12 George Mandler, Mind and Body: Psychology of  Emotion and Stress (New York: Norton, 1984).

Foundation by Exclusion: Jealousy and Envy

59

priorities, and grabbing our attention. At the social level of communication, emotions can interrupt the orderly f low of discourse, realigning our topics and transforming our definitions of  the situation. In both cases, the principle of ambivalence holds true: emotions might be welcome interruptions that remind one of  the meaning of one’s life or of  the important things ‘between’ people, or they might be unwelcome interruptions that one works hard to exclude. Either way, the relation we adopt to these interruptions is important. When the third knocks at the door in a manner that cannot be ignored, one’s impulse might be to open it or to bolt it shut. This ambivalence is a distinctive characteristic of paralogic. Another important meaning of  ‘thirdness’ is ‘mediation’, and this concept supplements the notion of interruption.13 A mediator is a ‘go between’ that acts as a medium between first and second positions. It is very easy to ignore processes of mediation for the simple reason that the medium or mediator is precisely what must be ignored if a message is to pass through (be mediated by) it. If and when, however, the mediator or medium does ‘show up’, then it necessarily does so as an interruption, since it intrudes upon the message. Once again, this is a general principle applicable to any system. More to the point, not only is it applicable at physical, biological, psychological and social levels, it also contributes to an explanation of  the emergence of such levels, since organic processes ‘parasite’ physical and chemical processes, whilst consciousness ‘parasites’ its biological sub-structures. The electro-magnetic radiation of  light, for instance, is the physical medium of our vision; vibrations in the air mediate our hearing; oxygen mediates our breathing, etc. For the biological ‘message’ of vision to pass through, the physical ‘medium’ of  light must, in a sense, disappear. Likewise, we rarely notice the air we breathe, unless that air is particularly polluted. In these juxtapositions of  the physical and the biological, if  the physical mediator shows up, it ‘interrupts’ the biological process, and in so doing transforms from medium to message.

13

Steven D Brown and Paul Stenner, Psychology Without Foundations: History, Philosophy and Psychosocial Theory (London: Sage, 2009), chapter 3, pages 37–61.

60

Paul Stenner

Likewise, we rarely notice our lungs, unless we are unfortunate enough to be in poor health. To say that we ‘notice’ the mediation of our lungs suggests that we have become conscious of  them. In this case we are dealing with mediation not between ‘physical’ and ‘biological’ levels, but between a ‘biological’ level and a ‘psychological’ level (‘consciousness’). Consciousness too is made possible via biological mediation, itself mediated physically. But the same principle of  the ‘disappearance’ of  the mediator holds true, as does the principle that interruption is the becoming-message of  the mediator. We are typically unconscious, for example, both of  the raging neural activity that makes our consciousness possible, and of  the broader torrent of  biological activity that sustains that neural activity in our brains.14 These mediators must disappear to allow the work of mediation to take place. Our conscious experience, however, is not just made possible by mediation but is itself a form of mediation at a dif ferent ‘level’ of existence. As such, it too must disappear. Hence, typically it is not consciousness itself  that shows up to us, but rather through it, and thanks to it, we can vainly imagine that we are in direct communion with the things in the world. We adopt the ‘natural attitude’ and take our perceptual experiences as if  they were encounters with unmediated reality. However, when we get so nervous and emotional that we hear our hearts beating in our ears, these usually invisible biological mediators suddenly show up and dominate the conscious experience that they were previously silently mediating. To complete the picture, we rarely notice the language that mediates our communication with each other. When we share a language, and can communicate freely, the language itself seems magically to disappear, and we appear to understand each other as if we could experience one another’s minds – as if we were ‘open souls’ one to another. But when we are learning a foreign language, or dealing with unfamiliar concepts or experiences, suddenly the language itself starts to obtrude and interrupt. When I cannot quite find the words I need to express what I am trying to say, I suddenly

14

To be open to signals from the environment our ears must be closed to the noise of our body. Were it not for the fact that the organ of  Corti in the cochlea is isolated from the blood stream, we would be deafened by our own pulse.

Foundation by Exclusion: Jealousy and Envy

61

have an experience with language itself. I become self-conscious and my consciousness starts to get in the way of our communication. Suddenly your thoughts, feelings and intentions become opaque obstacles blocking the path of shared experience and expression, and so do my own. Once again, the point here is to establish a generally applicable principle of mediation transforming into message. Mediators are everywhere, silently shaping our experiences. They only appear when things are not running smoothly, and things rarely run smoothly for long. These notions of  foundation by exclusion, paralogic, interruption and mediation are general and transdisciplinary concepts applicable at many levels of analysis. Elsewhere I have made the case that they are particularly useful for understanding human emotions.15 In the remainder of  this chapter I will use them to illuminate the so-called ‘green’ emotions by focusing upon the figure of  the third in scenes of jealousy and envy. Such a focus indicates that the complex and ambivalent figure of  the third, although neglected in most accounts of  these emotions,16 is in fact an indispensable key to understanding them.

II.  Jealousy and envy Jealousy and envy can be understood as attributes of psychosocial ‘systems’ that are produced and re-produce themselves through the mechanism of  the excluded third. I talk of psychosocial systems since they concern both

15 16

Paul Stenner, ‘An Outline of an Autopoietic Systems Approach to Emotions’, Cybernetics and Human Knowing 12/4 (2005), 8–22. For exceptions see Hildegard Baumgart, Jealousy: Experiences and Solutions (Chicago: University of  Chicago Press, 1990), Bram Buunk and Pieternel Dijkstra, ‘Gender Dif ferences in Rival Characteristics that Evoke Jealousy in Response to Emotional Versus Sexual Infidelity’, Personal Relationships, 11 (2004), 395–408, and Jef frie Murphy, ‘Jealousy, Shame and the Rival’, Philosophical Studies 108 (2002), 143–50.

62

Paul Stenner

subjective psychic events and social communications and interactions.17 This is important since much of  the psychological literature conceives of  these emotions qua intrapsychic phenomena. In this literature, for instance, jealousy is typically related to such issues as genetic inheritance, learned dispositions, attachment styles, modes of cognition and personality traits and states.18 The problem with this intrapsychic focus is that jealousy and envy are poorly understood as individual experiences, character traits or behavioural syndromes alone.19 This is because – as most definitions do not fail to recognize – both are characterized by an implicit triangular structure of relations, and hence could be considered as micro-social ‘configurations of  the third’.20 Recognition of  this enables a focus upon thirdness. As Girard puts it: ‘Jealousy and envy imply a third presence: object, subject and a third person toward whom the jealousy or envy is directed. These two “vices” are therefore triangular.’21 A related problem is that in the psychological literature experiences of jealousy and envy are typically treated in isolation from the broader temporal and relational context in

17

For a more conventional psychosocial approach to jealousy see Robert Bringle, ‘Psychosocial Aspects of  Jealousy: A Transactional Model’, in Peter Salovey, ed., Psychology of  Jealousy and Envy (New York: Guilford, 1991), 103–31. 18 See, for example, David Buss, Randy Larson, Drew Westen and Jennifer Semmelroth, ‘Sex Dif ferences in Jealousy: Evolution, Physiology and Psychology’, Psychological Science 3 (1992), 251–5; Catherine Radecki-Bush, Albert Farrell and Joseph Bush, ‘Predicting Jealous Responses: The Inf luence of  Adult Attachment and Depression on Threat Appraisal’, Journal of  Social and Personal Relationships 10 (1993), 569–88; Kenneth Levy and Kristen Kelly, ‘Sex Dif ferences in Jealousy: A Contribution From Attachment Theory’, Psychological Science 21/2 (2010), 168–73. 19 Paul Stenner and Rex Stainton Rogers, ‘Jealousy as a Manifold of  Divergent Understandings: A Q methodological Investigation’, The European Journal of  Social Psychology 28 (1998), 71–94. 20 Gregory White and Paul Mullen, Jealousy: Theory, Research and Clinical Strategies (London: The Guilford Press, 1989); W. Gerrod Parrott, ‘The Emotional Experience of  Envy and Jealousy’, in Peter Salovey, ed., Psychology of  Jealousy and Envy, 3–30. 21 René Girard, Deceit, Desire and the Novel (London: John Hopkins University Press, 1976), 12.

Foundation by Exclusion: Jealousy and Envy

63

which they have their being.22 They are treated in abstraction as if  they were discrete and self-contained factors. A focus on thirdness gives us better access to the synthetic unity of relations that obtain between such things as jealousy, envy, love and desire.23 Let us brief ly elaborate the triangular structure of jealousy and envy. Jealousy names the troubled relationship of a subject to a rival they wish to exclude. The rival is a third party that threatens to ‘interrupt’ a valued relationship that the subject has (or imagines they have) with another (the ‘object’). The rival hence threatens to expose the subject to exclusion from their relation with the object. In this sense jealousy is as much a ‘location’ or a ‘position’ as an individual experience.24 This ‘positionality’ could be emphasized by hyphenating the word ex-posure (or ex-position). We call any reactions (whether explicitly op-positional or not) to this particular type of  threatened ex-posure ‘jealousy’.

22

Process oriented systems theoretical approaches to jealousy remain undeveloped, but beginnings have been made by AnnMarie Cano and K. Daniel O’Leary, ‘Romantic Jealousy and Af fairs: Research and Implications for Couple Therapy’, Journal for Sex and Marital Therapy 23/4 (1997), 249–75; Gregory White, ‘Self, Relationship, Friends, and Family: Some Applications of  Systems Theory to Romantic Jealousy’, in Peter Salovey, ed., Psychology of  Jealousy and Envy, 231–51. 23 Melanie Klein, Envy and Gratitude: A Study of  Unconscious Sources (London: Tavistock Publications, 1957), 8, points to the ‘close connection between jealousy, greed and envy’, although she thinks of  the latter as more primal and consequently neglects their contemporaneous interconnections. 24 For analyses of jealousy using the concept of subject position, see Paul Stenner, ‘Discoursing Jealousy’, in Erica, Burman and Ian Parker, eds, Discourse Analytic Research: Repertoires and Readings of  Texts in Action (London: Routledge, 1993), pp. 94–132, and Mandy Morgan, Christine Stephens, Keith Tuf fin, Angelique Praat and Antonia Lyons, ‘Lawful Possession: A Constructionist Approach to Jealousy Stories’, New Ideas in Psychology 15/1 (1997), 71–8.

64

Paul Stenner 1a: Triangular structure with relation between subject and object Subject

Object Rival

1b: Broken line indicates interrupted relation Subject

Object Rival Figure 1: Triangular Structure of  Jealousy

In situations of envy, by contrast, it is the envious subject who self-perceives as being excluded from a relation between a rival and their object. The envious subject hence plays the role of  the excluded third figure. In cases of malign envy, the subject experiences this as an im-position and wishes to inf lict that exclusion on their rival by interrupting the contested relationship: they perceive themselves to be unjustly excluded from a relation to an object by a rival. That is to say, the im-posed upon envious subject threatens to ex-pose the rival to a comparable exclusion. We call any reactions (experienced or expressed) to this particular type of subject position ‘envy’.

65

Foundation by Exclusion: Jealousy and Envy 2a: Triangular structure with relation between rival and object Subject Object

Rival

2b: Broken line indicates interrupted relation Subject

Object

Rival Figure 2: Triangular Structure of  Envy

The key dif ference is hence that in jealousy the subject has a claim (whether real or imagined) to the object to the extent that this could be lost, whilst the envious subject lacks that relationship and begrudges it in another.25 In my view, this dif ference between possessing (and guarding) and desiring to 25 Klein, Envy and Gratitude; Georg Simmel, Conf lict and the Web of  Group Af filiations (Glencoe: Free Press, 1955).

66

Paul Stenner

possess (and resenting) has, despite its pertinence, led to an exaggeration of  the dif ference between jealousy and envy amongst psychologists and social scientists and to a neglect of some interesting structural similarities including the broader systemic unity proper to both.26 It is a distinction based upon the perspective of  the subject alone, and it neglects what I believe to be the decisive question of  the relation to the third. In fact, it is an ideal-typical distinction that can be contrasted with the much muddier situation of everyday life. Often, for example, it is less than clear whether or not someone can be said to have a relationship to (or a claim to) an object or to possess something. Consider the following typical outline of a scene of jealousy derived from my own research programme, in which my collaborators and I ask participants to generate and then elaborate upon many little ‘scenarios’ of selected emotions:27 [Karen] is jealous of a neighbour who has a child [by] [Karen’s] husband. She is mainly jealous because of  the child and the emotions that the child stirs within her husband. Therefore anything that her husband does for his child is seen as an act of  betrayal to her and their marriage[.]

In this example Karen is the jealous subject and her neighbour is the rival. The scene can be described as jealousy to the extent that the neighbour threatens to interrupt Karen’s relationship with her husband. The husband thus plays the role of  the object that Karen fears to lose and jealously guards. But in this situation the child too features as a rival of sorts, since it is the husband’s feelings for the child that are singled out as an act of  betrayal. In

26

27

Georg Simmel, Conf lict and the Web of  Group Af filiations, 50, for instance, emphasises the importance of clearly distinguishing jealousy (which is a matter of keeping) from envy (which is a matter of attaining), and thus neglects the forms of mutual imbrication indicated in this chapter. Another relevant dif ference that has led to separate treatment is that, in situations of jealousy, subject, object and third are typically people, whilst in envy the object may often literally be an object like a car or a job. This dif ference may explain why some, often following Klein, consider envy dyadic rather than triangular, and more fundamental than jealousy, again obscuring their interconnections. This data was collected by a former student named Ingrid Hoeritzauer.

Foundation by Exclusion: Jealousy and Envy

67

a sense it is the neighbour and the child as a single complex unit that poses the threat of interruption. These are the ‘thirds’ that the jealous subject wishes to exclude. However, viewed from another angle, this scene looks like a classic example of envy. Karen herself is the excluded third party who lacks the parent-child bond that she sees, to her discomfort, her husband and neighbour enjoying. She covets something she doesn’t have and this positions her outside of  their bond, in an ex-posed location. Karen is the envious subject, the object is an ideal form of  loving bond and the other characters are rivals that expose Karen’s lack. This kind of ambiguity is so typical of situations of jealousy and envy that it could be considered the rule rather than the exception. Here is another typical scenario: Maria talks to Jack, a friend of  Peter’s (the jealous subject), at a party which all three attend. Maria and Peter are going out together and although they both trust each other, Peter still finds it dif ficult to watch Maria and Jack chatting and laughing. Peter is jealous and although he wants everyone to have a good time, he is a bit jealous of  the situation and tries to ensure the conversation between Maria and Jack stops or that Peter is involved in it. Nothing is ever really said, but Peter watches.

Here Peter is the jealous subject, and Jack is the rival who interrupts his relationship with the object, Maria. But, once again, one could equally well say that Peter is the envious excluded third party who wishes to interrupt the pleasurable bond between Jack and Maria that he precisely lacks. This question of who exactly is the ‘third’ once again turns out to be very much a matter of perspective. The link between jealousy and envy is hence much more intimate than is often suggested, and a clear distinction risks distortion. This link is implicit in figures one and two above once the dimension of  time, or of process, is introduced. That is to say, to the extent that the jealous subject does experience the loss they fearfully expect, they find themselves in the excluded position of  the envious subject. And to the extent that the envious subject does lay claim to and appropriate the object they desire, they find themselves in the position of  the jealous subject fearing to lose it. There is hence a temporal dynamic whereby the same subject can oscillate from jealousy to envy. We might express this colloquially by saying ‘one moment I have it, the next I lack it’. Such ‘within-subject’ oscillations between jealousy

68

Paul Stenner

and envy depend upon the relation to the rival, since the rival is either the one we think wants the object, or the one we think has it. But alongside this potential ‘within-subject’ oscillation there is also an intimate ‘between-subjects’ dynamic whereby dif ferent individuals can face one another from complementary envious and jealous positions. In this case the envy of  the one inspires the jealousy of  the other and so forth in a spiral of positive feedback. This points to the decisive importance of  the relationship between the emotional (jealous or envious) subject and their rival. That is to say, as Shakespeare was so well aware, the greatest threat to the jealous subject who fears loss is the envious rival who wishes to inf lict it.28 Symmetrically, the greatest threat to the acquisitive desire of  the envious subject is the jealous rival who refuses to give up their prize. To adapt a famous Freudian formula, if envy secretly thinks ‘where it is, there I shall be’, then jealousy anxiously thinks ‘where I am, there it shall be’.29 We might express this colloquially by saying ‘one moment I have it, the next they have it’. Further, there is an interesting and revealing symmetry between envy and jealousy with respect to coping strategies adopted by the subject. It is quite typical in situations of envy, for example, for the subject to derogate the rival who is thus presented as not deserving the object.30 The object thereby remains intact as an object of desire. However, as the sour grapes fable tells us, we can also manage the frustrated desire by derogating the object. I do not desire it after all, since in fact it is undesirable – the grapes I cannot reach are sour anyway! This object-derogating strategy does not require the derogation of  the third. Likewise jealousy can take the direction of an aggressive attack on the deplorable nature of  the rival.31 Here again 28 The obvious example here is the relationship between Iago’s envy and Othello’s jealousy. 29 ‘Where id [in German ‘Es’ the ordinary word for ‘it’] was, there ego shall be’ appears in Sigmund Freud, New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, Volume 2 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973), 112. 30 Peter Salovey, ed., Psychology of  Jealousy and Envy; Helmut Schoeck, Envy: A Theory of  Social Behaviour (London: Martin Secker & Warburg Limited, 1969). 31 Mandy Morgan, et al, ‘Lawful Possession’, 71–8.

Foundation by Exclusion: Jealousy and Envy

69

the object might (or might not)32 remain intact as an object of desire.33 However, jealousy can also entail the derogation of  the object and an attack on its worth.34 That is, through jealousy the object can show itself after all to be despicable and not worth having: it is spoiled. So, in both envy and jealousy, the desirability of  the object, as it were, hangs in the balance. The same object can undergo an instantaneous transformation in value from highly desirable to utterly worthless. The green-eyedmonster mocks the meat it feeds on in this precise sense: what is wanted so much and guarded so zealously is subject to a transformation in value. This ambivalence leads Othello to his murderous end, and leads some of us to sympathize with Don Jose as he jealously thrusts his knife into Carmen’s fickle body and throws himself onto her screaming ‘Carmen! – Carmen! – I love you! – Speak to me! – I adore you!’ In such cases, a channel opened up by desire and af fection is re-traversed by hatred as if a once fresh stream had been poisoned at source. We might express this colloquially by saying ‘one moment it means everything, the next it means nothing’. The jealous subject often needs to know that which they cannot bear to be true. Consider the following extract from Emile Zola’s The Beast in Man (1890): ‘Confess. You slept with him. Confess you slept with him God damn you’ he cried ‘or I’ll knife you!’ She could see murder plain on his face … fear overcame her; she capitulated just to end it all. ‘All right then, yes it’s true. Now let me go.’ After that it was frightful. The admission which had been so savagely extracted was a direct body blow … He seized her head and banged it against the table …35

32

Jef f  Bryson, ‘Modes of  Response to Jealousy Evoking Situations’, in Salovey, ed., Psychology of  Jealousy and Envy, 178–206. 33 Jeremy Dugosh, ‘On Predicting Relationship Satisfaction from Jealousy: The Moderating Ef fects of  Love’, Current Research in Social Psychology 5/17 (2000), 1–8, finds that jealousy can increase or decrease satisfaction with a relationship depending upon the ‘love’ involved. 34 Paul Mullen and J Martin, ‘Jealousy: A Community Study’, The British Journal of  Psychiatry 164 (1994), 35–43. 35 Cited in Paul Mullen, ‘A Phenomenology of  Jealousy’, Australia and New Zealand Journal of  Psychiatry 24/1 (1990), 17–28.

70

Paul Stenner

But in scenarios of jealousy and envy the figure of  the third is also subject to instantaneous transformations in value. In scenarios of envy, the hated rival might once have been an admired ‘model’ – someone the subject emulated and wished to be like. The admired model transforms in time into the envied rival. Some of my younger research participants (a group of  British 15- to 16-year-olds), for instance, created a short play to illustrate the role that jealousy and envy might play in the lives of  their age group.36 One play depicted the envy a younger sister (the subject, Julie) felt towards her older sister (the rival, Maria) due to the fact that the subject was prevented by her parents from going to a disco (the object). It was very clear from the play that the younger sister greatly admired the older sister, in whom she saw many desirable qualities. However, when Maria is told, unlike Julie, that she will be allowed to host a disco, Julie has the following envious thoughts: [in her thoughts] It’s not fair, I’m not even allowed to go to a disco, let alone have one here at home. Maria always gets everything; friends, good marks, and everyone likes her better than me. I’m going to get her back, she’s going to be sorry that she’s so popular.

Julie’s response is to sabotage Maria’s disco. When confronted by a bemused Maria, Julie replies as follows: Anyway, it serves you right for being so popular. Everyone prefers you. You get everything, and you never thought of sharing a disco with me, did you? I’m sure mum would have agreed if you’d had anything to do with it.

In these extracts it is significant that Julie is presented by these young authors as being fixated upon the positive qualities of  her rival, who is ‘so popular’ and whom ‘everyone prefers’. Maria seems both to inspire desire in Julie and to have the power to satisfy that desire (‘I’m sure mum would have agreed …’). Julie wants so much to have a disco because this would make her more like her ‘grown up’ sister. But whereas the younger sister is rather 36

I called this methodology ‘seeded thematics’, see Paul Stenner, Feeling Deconstructed: With Particular Reference to Jealousy (Unpublished PhD Thesis, University of  Reading, 1992).

Foundation by Exclusion: Jealousy and Envy

71

preoccupied with the older, Maria ‘never even thought’ of  Julie. The exposure here seems to consist of  the fact that Maria is everything to Julie who finds she is nothing to Maria. It is only because Maria means so much to Julie that Julie can respond with such envy. To put it metaphorically, the positive af fect of admiring emulation running as if in a channel between subject and third is re-traversed by envy, and thus ‘turns green’. Similarly, in scenarios of jealousy it is not uncommon to detect a theme whereby the rival is held in very high esteem by the jealous subject. This tends to be downplayed in accounts of jealousy, however, simply because any such positive feelings are occluded by the jealous state itself. Often, however, one finds that the rival was a previous ‘best friend’ or admired acquaintance of  the jealous subject. Adding the temporal dimension in such cases reveals a situation where such admiration is transformed by (or into) negative af fect.37

III.  Jenvy and paralogic The structural similarities discussed above point to an underlying systemic unity that can be grasped in terms of paralogic. Jealous and envious experiences and expressions can be thus understood as aspects of  broader

37

Philip Broemer and Michael Diehl, ‘Romantic Jealousy as a Social Comparison Outcome: When Similarity Stings’, Journal of  Experimental Social Psychology 40/3 (2004), 393–400, suggest that under certain circumstances greater jealousy will be experienced by a subject when the rival is attractive in ways similar to them. In my view, however, the social comparison theory used to explain this lacks the coherence of an approach informed by paralogic, as does the theory of self-evaluation maintenance proposed by David DeSteno and Peter Salovey, ‘Jealousy and the Characteristics of one’s Rival: A Self-evaluation Maintenance Perspective’, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 22 (1996), 920–32. Jealousy, I suggest, is not just about comparisons to rivals which challenge our otherwise autonomous sense of self, but about that sense of self  being always-already mediated by others.

72

Paul Stenner

psychosocial systems (rather than as discrete self-contained factors) that reproduce themselves through the mechanism of  foundation by exclusion. The material discussed in the previous section draws attention to the fact that all three terms in triangles of jealousy and envy (the subject’s self-perception; their perception of  the rival; and their perception of  the object) are subject to the radical f luctuations in value that characterize such experiences. I have drawn particular attention to the relation between the subject and the rival and suggested that the oscillations ‘within’ and ‘between’ subjects’ depend upon the present state of  this relationship. Complexities such as these remain inexplicable if we assume that the role of  the rival in jealousy is simply to interrupt an already existing relationship between a subject and their object. It is possible to understand these complexities, however, and also those that pertain to envy, if we suppose that the f luid relation of desire between a subject and an object is mediated by a third party. This would be an example of  the principle discussed earlier of  the interrupter as the becoming-message of  the mediator. In other words, it is only because the third party first mediates the subject’s relation to the object that they can subsequently interrupt the message, and take its place. To return to my previous example, to suggest that Maria mediates her younger sister’s relation to her objects is to suggest that Julie’s desire for holding a disco is inspired by the fact that she perceives this to be Maria’s desire. She copies, as it were, Maria’s desire. It is not the object ‘as such’ that is decisive, nor the foibles of  Julie’s character or preferences, but what the object symbolizes thanks to the fact that Maria is thought (or known) to desire it. This, in fact, is how Girard defines ‘mimetic desire’.38 If  this were correct, then what Julie aspires to is not the ‘brute’ object but the status of  being the kind of  being that has that object: that is to say, the kind of  being that Maria appears to be. At the same time, the fact of a shared (because

38

René Girard, Deceit, Desire and the Novel (London: John Hopkins University Press, 1976).

Foundation by Exclusion: Jealousy and Envy

73

copied) desire is likely, for obvious reasons, to lead to rivalry and conf lict.39 Girard expresses this as follows: Imitation does not merely draw people together, it pulls them apart. Paradoxically, it can do these two things simultaneously. Individuals who desire the same thing are united by something so powerful that, as long as they can share whatever they desire, they remain the best of  friends; as soon as they cannot, they become the worst of enemies.40

To suggest that a third party might mediate the desire of a subject is to give a fundamental role to the third, since the third does not just ‘frustrate’ the subject’s desire, but, as it were, stimulates and gives rise to it in the first place. That is to say, the third is a constitutive part of  the system in question, and not just an incidental nuisance or obstruction that can be done away with once and for all. This means, as I suggested earlier, that the relation adopted to the third becomes decisively important. To return to our principle of  foundation by exclusion, for the system to continue, the ‘noise’ of  the mediator must be held at the boundary of  the system and included in the system as excluded material. The noise nevertheless continually threatens to return and interrupt the system in the form of experiences of jealousy and envy. The relationship of  the system to the thirdness of its noise is therefore fundamentally ambivalent. It is simultaneously the source of chaos and destruction (since the third-as-interrupter disrupts the system) and the source of productivity and creativity (since the third-as-mediator constructs the system). The implication of  this is that those involved in the system must play its noise very carefully, much as a surfer must judge a

As René Girard, Deceit, Desire and the Novel suggests, this kind of mediated desire is particularly clear when we witness very young children fighting over toys. During the fight it can appear as if  the toy were the single most important thing in the universe. But almost as soon as the fight is over, the toy loses its miraculous appeal and is quickly discarded by both. Naturally, we like to think that as adults our desires are authentic (i.e. grounded either in our subjective preference or in the desirable nature of  the object). But this desire for authenticity may also be mimetic. 40 René Girard, A Theatre of  Envy: William Shakespeare (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 3. 39

74

Paul Stenner

wave. Too much noise and it will collapse into chaos. Too little noise and it loses vitality, ossifies or stagnates. Although, as some of  the previous examples illustrate, neither jealousy nor envy are by any means exclusively tied to the domain of so-called romantic relationships, this domain provides some interesting illustrative examples. In this case the system in question would take the form of a relationship between two lovers, a first person and a second person. We can conceive of  this in ideal terms as a channel free of obstructions (third-asmediator) forming a relation between the two stations (lovers). A paralogical approach suggests that there is always a mediating channel, since such a micro-system is possible only on the basis of  the principle of  the excluded third (the parasite).41 There are hence never just two players (a subject and their object) but always at least three, and the micro-system created by the two lovers emerges as a function of its relation to the third. When the third mediates, the relationship comes to appear as self-suf ficient, as if just two players were involved. But this invisibility of  the third is always temporary, lasting only until the intermediary interrupts the relation it mediates, causing the medium to become the message. In discussing the historical emergence of a semantics of  love as passion in the seventeenth century, Luhmann states that: one of  the most obvious hallmarks of  the semantics of  love (in contrast to notions of  friendship) is its exclusivity, in that it is generally regarded – and there is a broad consensus on this point – that one can only love one person at any one time.42

This exclusivity means, of course, that each lover chooses the other, and only the other, above all others. The category ‘all others’ hence plays the role of  the generalized excluded third that permits the couple system to emerge. In addition, the exclusive semantics of  love require a thoroughly 41

‘The parasite always plugs into the system; the parasite is always there; it is inevitable. The parasite is the third in a trivial model, the three-branched star. Here now is the relation that cannot be analysed; that is to say, there is none simpler … A third exists before the second. A third exists before the other.’ (Serres, The Parasite, 63). 42 Luhmann, Love as Passion: The Codification of Intimacy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 97.

Foundation by Exclusion: Jealousy and Envy

75

personalized form of communication whereby each lover both af firms the particular world-view of  the other and locates the lover at the centre of  this. As Luhmann puts it, ‘the informative content of all communication is constantly being enriched by the ingredient of  “for you”’.43 A shared intersubjective world is created in relative isolation from what we call the ‘outside world’. As Roland Barthes notes: ‘What I want is a little cosmos (with its own time, its own logic) inhabited only “by the two of us”’.44 It is Romeo and Juliet versus the world, and this versus is decisive. The figure of  the third is thus necessary for the existence of  the couple, but it is necessary as excluded (the third is included as excluded). This paradox is solved routinely by way of  the kind of communication that suggests that Romeo is the only one for Juliet and Juliet the only one for Romeo. But including the figure of  the third as excluded can be a dangerous business. It creates a borderline or threshold which must not be crossed. When a third party crosses the line and gets too close, the couple system is perturbed, and risks breaking down. I will now illustrate some of  these conceptual points drawing upon interview material from Mark Finn, who interviewed his participants on the topic of monogamous and non-monogamous relationships:45 Tricia (h/m): it [sexual monogamy] creates a bit of a, a unity and a bond. And it’s us versus the world. And special ‘cause you know you’re sharing something only with that person and vice versa. Brian: In my schooling and everything, what we’re doing is not monogamy … You know? The pure definition of  the word it just doesn’t fit so I can’t really use that word. We have an intimate bond that is not shared with everyone else and no one else can get into that, into that field sort of  thing.

The imagery here is striking. What Barthes calls a ‘little cosmos’ Tricia calls ‘a unity’ and Brian calls a ‘field’. The emergent system as unified field 43 Ibid., 21. 44 Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse (London: Vintage Books, 2002), 139. 45 Mark Finn, The Discursive Domain of  Coupledom: A Post-structuralist Psychology of its Productions and Regulations (PhD Thesis, University of  Western Sidney, 2005).

76

Paul Stenner

is not just distinguished from its environment but is described, much as Luhmann suggests, as being in an agonistic relation to it: ‘it’s us versus the world’. The noise of  the outside world must be kept at bay for the signal of coupledom to emerge. However, these interviewees also describe the ever-present danger of interruptions that threaten to disrupt and even destroy their system: Angela: I just don’t think there’s anything quite as strong and as sacred as an intimate bond between two individuals. As soon as another person’s involved it gets mixed up and spread out and it’s just dif ferent. Allan: It’s like something that is non-broken is whole. Something that’s broken is broken. It’s not working anymore. A monogamous relationship is a whole thing. And if someone is non-monogamous then it’s broken. It’s damaged. Ricky: It [monogamy] is like a sort of  Venn diagram or whatever. Do you know what I mean? There must be a central type overlap that keeps it all, you know, that keeps it all from spinning out of control. Geraldine: [in sexual monogamy] you want to share an intimate space with your partner and you don’t want anyone else to come inside … that’s monogamy …… Our intimate space for the moment is just me and him. I’m scared because it’s such a precious space and it’s so easy. Um I’m scared that by opening a little door we might not um, we might not be able to face, not able to face, but maybe our relationship is not strong enough.

These extracts describe the fragility of  the unity in question. A whole that is broken is broken, it doesn’t work any more. Like a punctured vacuum, the sacred and precious space can be broken and spoiled and ‘it’s so easy’. All that is required is a small opening to the excluded outside and ‘it’s broken … it’s damaged’; ‘it gets mixed up and spread out’; it goes ‘spinning out of control’. This imagery describes perfectly the relationship between system and noise. Open a little door and in comes the noise. The fragile system returns to chaos. Typically, it is third-party sexuality that plays the role of included/ excluded third. As Freud once said: ‘It is a matter of everyday experience … that fidelity, especially that degree of it required in marriage, is only

Foundation by Exclusion: Jealousy and Envy

77

maintained in the face of continual temptations’.46 Infidelity in the form of  third party sexuality thus functions in the simultaneously creative and destructive fashion typical of paralogic. Its interruptions are managed by way of elaborate semantics of  trust and temptation. Depending upon position (i.e. on whether one is the ‘victim’ or the ‘perpetrator’), its eruptions of noise are experienced subjectively as feelings such as guilt or jealousy. It should be made clear, however, that extra-dyadic sexuality as such is not necessarily the decisive factor that must be excluded. What matters is rather the intimacy of  the highly personalized ‘for you’ ingredient that helps constitute the microcosm, field or unity. Non-monogamous couples, as Finn’s work amply demonstrates, often describe ways in which extra-dyadic sex can even be incorporated into this sacred space only ‘for us’.47 It is thus perfectly possible for extra-dyadic sex to symbolize what is precisely unique and exclusive about a relationship that can tolerate it. Some, for instance, have a rule that both non-monogamous partners be present whenever sex with a third party is involved, thus ensuring that the experience is shared together and thus still ‘about’ the couple. This can be emphasized through the explicit agreement to treat the ‘third party’ simply as a ‘plaything’ or ‘object of pleasure’ shared by the non-monogamous couple, whose unity is thus intensified. Others, by contrast, have a rule of  keeping their af fairs completely distinct from the world of  their couple. What matters, it seems, is not the content of  the rule but the fact of  their being an agreed rule. These regulations and strategies serve to minimize any perturbations caused by the interruptions of  the third and to render them productive rather than destructive. The strategies work, in short, by rendering any experiences with the third expectable and pre-classifiable by the couple. There is a paradox here, of course. The more successful this process of  tranquillizing the ef fects of  the third in the name of  the couple is, the 46 Cited in Ayala Pines, Romantic Jealousy: Causes, Symptoms, Cures (London: Routledge, 1998), 50. 47 Mark Finn, ‘Conditions of  Freedom in Practices of  Non-monogamous Commitment’, in Meg Barker and Darren Langdridge, eds, Understanding Non-monogamies (New York: Routledge, 2010), 225–36.

78

Paul Stenner

less worthwhile the relationship becomes. A relationship with no alarms and no surprises risks being a hollow and dull relationship. Without the mediating third, the exciting little cosmos of  the couple risks transforming into a desert island of emotional isolation. Without the third, some begin to wonder what, after all, was so fascinating and desirable about their lover. Only by directing attention to the role of  the third can this paradox be fully appreciated and understood. As I formulated it earlier, too much noise and the system will collapse into chaos, too little noise and the system loses vitality and ossifies. This perspective explains why commentators on jealousy so often comment upon the positive role that jealousy can sometimes play in the context of relationships.48 As one of my interviewees (a 20-year-old North London male) put it, jealousy is healthy in small doses I reckon. Because jealousy can keep something between you two that you always respect someone because there is that bit of jealousy inside … it always keeps you on your toes about somebody.

IV. Conclusion According to the Girardian thesis, the desirability of our object is assured if significant others find it desirable too, and enviously wish to take it, but in this way we risk actually losing our object. This would explain both the structural links between jealousy and envy and the instantaneous transformations in the value of subject, object and rival described earlier. As Girard puts it: ‘Only someone who prevents us from satisfying a desire which

48 Padmal De Silva, ‘Jealousy in Couple Relationships: Nature, Assessment and Therapy’, Behaviour Research and Therapy 35 (1997), 973–85; Eugene Mathes, Heather Adams and RM Davies, ‘Jealousy: Loss of  Relationship Rewards, Loss of  Self-esteem, Depression, Anxiety and Anger’, Journal of  Personality and Social Psychology 48/6 (1995), 1552–61.

Foundation by Exclusion: Jealousy and Envy

79

he himself  has inspired in us is truly an object of  hatred’.49 This essay has attempted to develop Girard’s work in the direction of a psychosocial process approach inspired by Serres’ paralogic and Luhmann’s systems theory. From this perspective, Girard’s notion of ‘mimetic desire’, for all its emphasis on interpersonal triangles, remains too focused upon the psychic orientation of individuals. I have suggested instead a focus upon the perspective of  the unified micro-social system that emerges and unfolds through its relation with noise. Jealousy and envy are expressions of  the dynamics of such systems. The individuals that experience these emotions psychically do so only as a function of  their enmeshment in this broader unity, itself enmeshed in its specific historical and cultural milieu.

49 Girard, Deceit, Desire and the Novel, 10.

Joachim Fischer

Turn to the Third: A Systematic Consideration of an Innovation in Social Theory

The third party plays an important role in human interaction and communication. There can be neither law nor court without the figure of  the judge, who decides between two litigants in conf lict with one another. The point of communications media is not so much the message but the messenger, who channels information between subjects, the sender and receiver, who are not in direct communication with each other.1 The mediator has a crucial role in human af fairs, cooling of f antagonisms: from everyday life among individuals to the diplomatic level among states.2 Sexual jealousy as a configuration and a human emotion is triggered by the third party of  the rival, who troubles the interaction between the two lovers.3 The impartial spectator, as a neutral observer, observes the relationship between two agents or actors with or without their knowledge. Can one discover a principle common to these dif ferent phenomena? In German social philosophy and sociological theory, in particular, and the humanities, in general, there has been a debate over the last fifteen years as to whether social theory should turn to the analysis of  the role of  the third party in order to conceptualize human af fairs, classically viewed from the

1

2 3

Joachim Fischer, ‘Das Medium ist der Bote. Zur Soziologie der Massenmedien aus der Perspektive einer Sozialtheorie des Dritten’, in Andreas Ziemann, ed., Medien der Gesellschaft – Gesellschaft der Medien (Konstanz: Konstanz University Press, 2006), 21–42. Ulrich Bröckling, ‘Governing by Triangulation: Mediation’, in this volume. Paul Stenner and Rex Stainton-Rogers, ‘Jealousy as a Manifold of  Divergent Understanding: a Methodology Investigation’, The European Journal of  Social Psychology 28, 1998, 71–94.

82

Joachim Fischer

standpoint of  ‘the Other’, from a new perspective.4 The decisive point in this debate is that the role of  the third party, which we will call ‘the Third’ in this context, is to be understood in a personal sense – as a third agent rather than a third realm of  being.5 Let us consider three questions: (1) Why is the Third important? For which academic disciplines, and at what level of research, is the Third relevant? (2) What are the arguments for taking the Third into consideration, for focusing on it as a centre of enquiry? (3) What are the consequences for, or benefits to, various academic disciplines in taking the Third into consideration?

4

5

See Thomas Bedorf, Joachim Fischer, Gesa Lindemann, eds, Theorien des Dritten. Innovationen in Soziologie und Sozialphilosophie (Munich: Fink, 2010), which focuses on the debate in social philosophy and sociology, and Eva Esslinger, Tobias Schlechtriemen, Doris Schweitzer, Alexander Zons, eds, Die Figur des Dritten. Ein kulturwissenschaftliches Paradigma (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 2010), which draws attention to ongoing debates in literary and cultural studies. See also Bernhard Waldenfels, Topographie des Fremden. Studien zur Phänomonologie des Fremden (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1997); Thomas Bedorf, Dimensionen des Dritten. Sozialphilosophische Modelle zwischen Ethischem und Politischem (Munich: Fink, 2003); Gesa Lindemann, ‘The Analysis of  the Borders of  the Social World: A Challenge for Sociological Theory’, Journal of  Social Behaviour 35/1, 2005, 69–97. My own contributions participate in this debate: Joachim Fischer, ‘Der Dritte. Zur Anthropologie der Intersubjektivität’, in Wolfgang Eßbach, ed., wir / ihr / sie. Identität und Alterität in Theorie und Methode (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2000), 103–36; ‘Figuren und Funktionen der Tertiarität. Zur Sozialtheorie der Medien’, in Joachim Michael and Markus K. Schäf fauer, eds, Massenmedien und Alterität, Frankfurt/Main: Vervuert, 2004), 78–86; ‘Tertiarität. Die Sozialtheorie des “Dritten” als Grundlegung der Kultur- und Sozialwissenschaften’, in Jürgen Raab et al., eds, Phänomenologie und Soziologie. Theoretische Positionen, aktuelle Problemfelder und empirische Umsetzungen (Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, 2008), 121–30; ‘Tertiarität / Der Dritte. Soziologie als Schlüsseldisziplin’, in Thomas Bedorf, Joachim Fischer and Gesa Lindemann, eds, Theorien des Dritten. Innovationen in Soziologie und Sozialphilosophie (Munich: Fink, 2010), 131–60; ‘Der lachende Dritte. Schlüsselfigur der Soziologie Simmels’, in Eva Eßlinger, Tobias Schlechtriemen, Doris Schweitzer and Alexander Zons, eds, Die Figur des Dritten. Ein kulturwissenschaft­ liches Paradigma (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp 2011), 193–207.

Turn to the Third

83

We seek to answer these questions as follows: (1) Let us introduce a presupposition: that attention to the role of  the Third is important for the humanities and the social sciences because their claim to form a specific group of academic disciplines has historically been based on the notion of  the Other. Only if we recognize the impact of  the Other on the humanities and the social sciences can we clarify the relevance of  the turn to the Third. (2) In order to make the Third an object of systematic enquiry, we shall advance four arguments for the relevance of  the Third. (3) We will outline the consequences for the humanities and the social sciences – ontological and methodological – should they take the Third, as well as the Other, into account. The crucial thesis is that by systematic ref lection on the role of  the Third (the second Other, who makes a dif ference to the first Other) the humanities and the social sciences can clarify their ontological and methodological autonomy in relation to other groups of academic disciplines, and can arrange their specific research potential more fruitfully.6

I.  The humanities and social sciences require a social theory I.1.  The humanities and social sciences as a special group of sciences The appropriate level at which to engage with the first question (Why is the Third important? For which academic disciplines, and at what level 6

Of course my considerations about the figures and functions of the Third are already inspired by hints to twentieth-century social theory: Michael Theunissen, Der Andere. Studien zur Sozialontologie der Gegenwart (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1965), 220–1; Theodor Litt, Individuum und Gemeinschaft. Grundlegung der Kulturphilosophie (Leipzig: Teubner, 1926), 111–14; Klaus Hartmann, Politische Philosophie, Freiburg: Alber, 1981), 28; Theodore Caplow, Two Against One. Coalitions in Triads (New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1968). Michael Ruskin, ‘Structural and Unconscious Implications of  the Dyad and the Triad: An Essay in Theoretical Integration; Durkheim, Simmel, Freud’, The Sociological Review 19 (1971), 179–201.

84

Joachim Fischer

of research, is the Third relevant?) is an approach to the humanities and the social sciences which regards them as a specific group of intellectual disciplines within specific epistemological boundaries and genealogical frames. Historical research, the study of  law or jurisprudence, anthropology, ethnology, economics, sociology, linguistics, the study of  language and literature, cultural studies, and media studies, to name but a few, all belong to this group. Ever since the humanities and social sciences emerged as a specific group of academic disciplines in the nineteenth century, they have required a social theory, that is, a theory of inter-subjectivity or of the Other. The need for this theoretical framework arises from both epistemological and ontological considerations. We can gather from basic methodological terms such as ‘the operation called understanding’,7 or from important ontological terms in these disciplines such as ‘struggle for recognition’,8 ‘empathy’,9 ‘dialogue’,10 ‘encounter’, ‘exchange’,11 ‘reciprocity’,12 ‘intersubjecitivity’,13 ‘communication’,14

7

Theodore Abel, ‘The Operation Called “Verstehen”’, in Herbert Feigl and May Brodleck, eds, Readings in the Philosophy of  Science (New York: Appleton-CenturyCrofts, 1953), 677–87. Max Weber, ‘Über einige Kategorien der verstehenden Soziologie’, in Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Wissenschaftslehre, ed. Johannes Winckelmann (Tübingen: Mohr, 1973), 161–214; Francis M. Berenson, Understanding Persons. Personal and Impersonal Relationships (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1981). 8 Georg W.F. Hegel, Phenomenology of  Spirit, trans. A.V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978); Axel Honneth, The Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of  Social Conf licts, trans. Joel Anderson (Cambridge: Polity, 1996). 9 Max Scheler, The Nature of  Sympathy, trans. Peter Heath (New York: Archon, 1970). 10 Martin Buber, I and Thou, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1970); Hans Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, 2nd rev. edn, trans. J. Weinsheimer and D.G. Marshall (New York: Continuum, 2004). 11 Peter Blau, Exchange and Power in Social Life (New York: Wiley 1964). 12 Alvin Ward Gouldner, ‘The norm of reciprocity: A preliminary statement’, American Sociological Review 25/2 (1960), 161–78. 13 Edmund Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, ed. Stephan Strasser, trans. Dorian Cairns (Dordrecht: Kluver, 1988). 14 George H. Mead, Mind, Self, and Society, ed. Charles W. Morris (Chicago: The University of  Chicago Press, 1968).

Turn to the Third

85

‘interaction’,15 ‘communicative action’,16 ‘double contingency’ (the mutual opacity of ego and alter ego)17 and ‘identity and alterity’,18 that a need for a basic social theory dif ferentiates the humanities and the social sciences from other disciplines – from, for example, natural science, philosophy, and theology. Reference to a theory of the Other, or inter-subjectivity – in whatever form – characterizes this methodological19 and ontological20 dif ference. The natural sciences epistemologically approach their ‘object’ within a subject-object relationship – a subject observing an object – and conceptualize the internal (ontological) relationships of  their object in terms of, for instance, causal connections among the elements. Philosophy in its modern Kantian shape approaches its particular questions (epistemological, ontological, and other) within self-ref lecting subjectivity, that is, within a context where the individual ref lects upon his own experience of  the objective world within a particular rationality – the transcendental human mind. Theology, by contrast, approaches its particular questions within a context of revelation of  the supernatural, namely the transcendent Third (God), who created all natural things: including all people and all of  their (social) relationships. The humanities and the social sciences, however, are based neither in a theory of subject-object-relation or of  the transcendental subject (the relation of self-ref lexivity), nor in the revelation of  God as

Talcott Parsons, ‘Social Interaction’, in International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, Vol. 7 (New York: Macmillan, 1968), 429–41. 16 Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of  Communicative Action, trans. Thomas McCarthy (Cambridge: Polity, 1987). 17 Parsons, ‘Social Interaction’, 429; Niklas Luhmann, Social Systems, trans. John Bednarz, Jr., with Dirk Baecker (Stanford: Stanford University Press 1995). 18 Emmanuel Levinas, Alterity and Transcendence, trans. Michael B. Smith (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999 [1970]). 19 A synopsis of  the methodolology of  the Other can be found in Jürgen Habermas, On the Logic of  Social Sciences, trans. Shierry Weber Nicolson and Jerry A. Stark (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988). 20 A synopsis of  the ontology of  the Other can be found in Theunissen, Der Andere. Studien zur Sozialontologie der Gegenwart; Alfred Schütz, The Phenomenology of  the Social World, trans. G. Walsh and F. Lehnert (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1967 [1932]). 15

86

Joachim Fischer

a transcendent third party. From their very beginnings as disciplines, the humanities and the social sciences, in their approaches to the socio-cultural world, have of necessity required a theory of inter-subjectivity. I.2.  The social theory of  the Other There is, within the rich history of social theory, a theory of inter-subjectivity (theory of  the Other), which developed alongside the humanities and the social sciences in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries – a theory which is deeply connected with their success as disciplines. This kind of  basic social theory is associated with names such as G.W.F. Hegel, Ludwig Feuerbach, Wilhelm Dilthey, Edmund Husserl, Charles Cooley, George H. Mead, Martin Buber, Jean Paul Sartre, Emanuel Levinas, Talcot Parsons and Niklas Luhmann. Some of  these theories of ego and alter ego are of course constructed within the disciplinary framework of philosophy,21 but since the beginning of  the nineteenth century this has always happened in relation to developments in the humanities and the social sciences. Prominent examples are the works of  Smith22 and Hegel,23 who in their social philosophy were profoundly challenged by the new disciplines of economics and jurisprudence; other examples include Dilthey, who in his historical scholarship felt the need to defend his achievements against any potential challenge from natural science;24 Cooley and Mead, who

21

The best analysis of  this tradition of  the theory of inter-subjectivity is Michael Theunissen, Der Andere; Axel Honneth, The Struggle for Recognition, provides a continuation of  this tradition using Hegelian concepts. 22 Adam Smith, The Theory of  Moral Sentiments (New York: Penguin, 2009). 23 The model for the ‘struggle of recognition’ is the famous master-slave chapter in Hegel’s Phenomenology of  Spirit. 24 Wilhelm Dilthey, Einleitung in die Geisteswissenschaften. Versuch einer Grundlegung der Gesellschaft und der Geschichte, in Gesammelte Schriften, vol. I. (Stuttgart: Teubner, 1959); Hans Georg Gadamer, ‘Subjectivity and Inter-subjectivity, Subject and Person’, Continental Philosophy Review, vol. 33, 2000, 275–87.

Turn to the Third

87

created a new sociology through ‘symbolic interactionism’;25 Buber, who in his famous I and Thou found himself challenged by the rise of sociology and all other social sciences, too.26 The whole so-called ‘transformation of philosophy’27 of  the twentieth century, from the transcendental ref lexivity of  the solitary thinking subject toward a basic theory of inter-subjectivity, communication, and language as the starting point of ref lection (the ‘linguistic turn’)28 eventuates as a result of  the success of  the humanities and the social sciences in establishing themselves as fully institutionalized academic disciplines. Accordingly, the place of social theory was shifted from philosophy to the humanities and social sciences, as they now ref lected upon their own methodological and ontological basis.29 Up to the present, social theory, in response to questions concerning the foundation of  this particular group of disciplines, has always of fered a theory of  the dyad or the Other and the third realm of  ‘trans-subjectivity’: the struggle for recognition, the ego and alter ego, I and Thou, identity and alterity, double contingency, through which the emergence of a third sphere (a higher unity such as language, the Hegelian ‘objective spirit’, culture, or social system, etc. as structuring agents) can be discerned. This third sphere, which includes the basic perspectives of ego and alter ego, which

Charles Cooley, The Two Major Works of  Charles H. Cooley, Social Organization. Human Nature and the Social Order. (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1956). 26 Martin Buber, I and Thou, who inf luenced all emphatic theories of dialogue und communication up to Hans Georg Gadamer and Emanuel Lévinas. 27 Karl Otto Apel, ‘Intentions, Conventions, and Reference to Things: Dimensions of  Understanding Meaning in Hermeneutics and in the Analytic Philosophy of  Language’, in Herman Parret and Jacques Bouveresse, eds, Meaning and Understanding (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1981), 79–111. 28 Peter Winch, The Idea of a Social Science and Its Relation to Philosophy (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1958), who is in the tradition of  Wittgenstein’s theory of  language-games: Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G.E.M. Anscombe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1953). Richard Rorty, ed., The Linguistic Turn. Recent Essays in Philosophical Method (Chicago: The University of  Chicago Press, 1967). 29 Habermas, On the Logic of  Social Sciences. 25

88

Joachim Fischer

are transformed by inter-subjectivity, serves as the starting point of enquiry for the humanities and the social sciences. I.3.  The social theory of  the Third It is from the perspective of  this particular group of institutionalized academic disciplines that one can understand the paradigmatic change brought about by the turn to the Third – the immanent Third (rather than the transcendent Third of  theology). The importance of  the third party is first emphasized by sociologists such as Georg Simmel, who systematically developed the idea that the Third both facilitates and disturbs the relationship between ego and alter ego. Moreover, he articulated dif ferent expressions of  the Third (the ‘arbiter’ and the ‘mediator’, the ‘laughing third’ or the ‘real winner’, the ruler by the guideline ‘divide et impera’) in a basic social theory of  ‘interaction’ (‘Wechselwirkung’), thus establishing his sociological theory.30 In analogy to (and independently of ) this, psychiatrists like Freud discovered the same principle. Freud, with his concepts of  family constellations as inevitable but dangerous ‘oedipal’ configurations, and his therapy through discourse, shifted the focus of psychiatry from natural science to the field of  the humanities and the social sciences: all erotic desire, for example, arises, in his analysis, from a triangulation in which the amorous rival, exclusion mechanisms, and jealousy play key roles.31 In the works of  Simmel and Freud one can discover the foundation docu30 Georg Simmel, ‘The Quantative Aspect of  the Group’, in The Sociology of  Georg Simmel, trans. and ed. Kurt H. Wolf f (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1950 [1908]), 122–69. See also Bart Noteboom, ‘Simmels Treatise on the Triad’, Journal of  Institutional Economics 2 (2006), 365–83; Joachim Fischer, ‘Der lachende Dritte. Schlüsselfigur der Soziologie Simmels’, in Eva Eßlinger, Tobias Schlechtriemen, Doris Schweitzer and Alexander Zons, eds, Die Figur des Dritten. Ein kulturwissenschaftliches Paradigma (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 2011), 193–207. 31 Sigmund Freud, A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis, trans. Joan Riviere (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1954). Otto F. Kernberg, ‘The Nature of  Interpretation: Intersubjectivity and the Third Position’, The American Journal of  Psychoanalysis 57 (1997), 297–312.

Turn to the Third

89

ments of  the general theory of  triangulation and triadic configurations. In this sense, both Simmel and Freud are major figures within the social sciences and their foundation in social theory – a theory now focused on the importance of  the Other to the relevance of  the Third.32 This gradual process of discovering the Third to be of  key importance was later consolidated by social philosophers such as Sartre,33 by philologists such as Girard, with his concepts of  the rival34 and the scapegoat,35 by theoreticians of ethics such as Lévinas,36 by media philosophers such as Serres,37 by cultural critics such as Bhabha, with the concept of  hybridity (the personal or cultural existence of  ‘being between’),38 by postmodernists such as Baumann,39 by network-sociologists such as Burt40 and by legally trained sociologists such as Luhmann, with his concept of  the judge as the

32

The French thinkers of social theory, for instance Julien Freund and Jacques Lacan, were impressed by Simmel’s and Freud’s findings: Julien Freund, ‘Der Dritte in Simmels Soziologie’, in Hannes Böhringer and Karlfried Gründer, eds, Ästhetik und Soziologie um die Jahrhundertwende: Georg Simmel (Frankfurt/Main: Klostermann, 1976), 90–104; Jacques Lacan, Écrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1977). 33 Jean Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness. An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology, trans. Hazel E. Barnes (London: Routledge, 2003); Jean Paul Sartre, Critique of  Dialectical Reason, trans. Alan Sheridan-Smith (London: Verso, 2004). 34 René Girard, Deceit, Desire and the Novel. Self and Other in Literary Structure, trans. Yvonne Freccero (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1966). 35 René Girard, Violence and the Sacred, trans. Patrick Gregory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977). 36 Levinas, Alterity and Transcendence, trans. Michael B. Smith (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999). 37 Michel Serres, The Parasite, trans. Lawrence R. Schehr (Minneapolis: University of  Minnesota Press, 2007); Michel Serres, Hermes: Literature, Science and Philosophy, ed. Josué V. Harari and David F. Bell (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press 1982). 38 Homi K. Bhabha, ‘The Third Space’, in Jonathan Rutherford, ed., Identity: Community, Culture, Dif ference (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1990), 207–21. 39 Zygmunt Bauman, Postmodern Ethics (Cambridge: Polity, 1993). 40 Ronald Burt, Structural Holes: The Social Structure of  Competition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992).

90

Joachim Fischer

observer of  the observers (or ‘second-order observation’).41 Thus while the discovery of  the Other is clearly an achievement of modernity, so also is the discovery of  the immanent Third, and this perhaps due to the role of  God as transcendent Third becoming limited through the process of secularization – as a consequence of which the immanent Third was discovered within the world itself. The turn to the Third has obviously something to do with the extension and consolidation of  the cognitive capacity, and the methodological autonomy, of  the humanities and the social sciences.42 To avoid a misunderstanding it is important to emphasize one point: the dependence upon seeing the Third as der Dritte (a third party/person) rather than das Dritte (a third realm of  being). The Third in this sense means ‘another’ whose functions are dif ferent from the ‘first other’ (the simple alter ego) and which is conceived of in such a way that the addition of a fourth or fifth party would not add any greater functionality to any schema involving simply first, other, and Third parties.

II.  Four arguments for the relevance of  the Third in    social theory Having explained the relevance of social theory (ref lection on the Other and the Third) for the foundation of  the humanities and the social sciences, we will now concentrate on distinguishing and systematizing four 41 Luhmann, Social Systems. Luhmanns general concept of  the constitution of communication by observation can be traced back to the concept of  the judge, whose expectations, according to the norms, are already co-expected by ego and alter ego in their dyadic interaction: Niklas Luhmann, A Sociological Theory of  Law (London: Routledge, 1985). 42 For an ethnological or cultural anthropological approach see Claudia Breger and Tobias Döring, eds, Figuren der/des Dritten. Erkundungen kultureller Zwischenräume (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1998).

Turn to the Third

91

arguments for the relevance of  the Third in social theory as the theory essential to those disciplines. II.1.  The argument from formal communication in language This argument relates to language, and to the importance of  language for inter-subjectivity. So this argument can be reformulated linguistically, with reference to the linguistic turn in social and cultural sciences. A core element of every language for the coordination of  basic roles of communication is the system of personal pronouns, for example, you or I or we.43 Much dyadic social theory, as mentioned before, already ref lects this key function of personal pronouns, starting its basic reconstruction with ego and alter ego, and transforming the personal pronouns, such as you, I, it, and we, into categories (as Feuerbach and Buber do). The Other here is another expression for the you within the system of personal pronouns, and the thing or matter is another term for it. But there are more formal positions of communication in the core of every language: there is a third personal position over and above you and I (namely he or she) and, as Norbert Elias observed in his social theory of  ‘figurations’, there are more plural positions than we (for example you (plural) and they). The system of personal pronouns, as a core element of every language (for coordinating basic roles of communication, ‘personal pronouns as a figurational model’44), includes not only I, you, and we, but also an important third position (it, he, or she). Here the system of personal pronouns dif fers between it (a marker for things or matters) and he/she (a marker for personal entities). That means: I and you can refer to it, an object to be watched or handled. Decisive for the whole system of perspectives, however, is the shift to the third-person position, he/she. This creates a new position at the core of  lan43 Wilhelm von Humboldt, ‘Ueber den Dualis’, in Werke in fünf  Bänden, vol. 3: Schriften zur Sprachphilosophie (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1963 [1827]), 113–43. 44 Norbert Elias, What is Sociology?, trans. Stephen Mennell (London: Hutchinson, 1978), 132–45.

92

Joachim Fischer

guage, which places both sides of a dyad – I and you – into a relationship, simultaneously comparing the binary-related positions and separating them. In the system of personal pronouns this triadic ef fect becomes an open constitutive mechanism. No singular fourth or fifth position is necessary within the system, but further plural positions, over and above we, are now possible. Obviously the logic of all languages requires the personal Third in order to reach the plural positions of you and they. You can only say you (plural) if speaking from the position of a third party. A theory of inter-subjectivity that is based on a dyadic model of interaction (the you as the Other and the it as a third realm) is not able to make accessible the system of personal pronouns as a whole. We need the Third to complete the basic communication formula of  language; so, from the viewpoint of  formal communication within language, the consideration of  the Third is as relevant to social theory as the you or the I. II.2.  The argument from familiarity and triangulation The Oedipus argument45 claims that human socialization of individuals is, of course, constituted by relation to the Other, but is only completed through triangulation (internalization of a third-party perspective).46 This argument is of course developed by psychoanalysis (Freud, Lacan, etc.) and social psychology. To recognize the gaze of the Other and to encounter the face of  the Other is one thing, and stimulates the ambivalent process of self-mirroring in the reference of  the ego to the other. But there is a further aspect of inter-subjectivity, a further turn in the constitution of  the self, when a relationship between the Other and the Third is perceived, from which the First is excluded. As Paul Stenner and others have shown, this experience of  being included/excluded is the source of  the emotions of jeal45 Elisabeth Fivaz-Depeursinge and Antoinette Corboz-Warnery, The Primary Triangle: A Developmental Systems View Of  Fathers, Mothers, And Infants (New York: Basic, 1999). 46 Lacan, Écrits; Jessica Benjamin, Shadow of  the Other: Intersubjectivity and Gender in Psychoanalysis (New York: Routledge, 1998).

Turn to the Third

93

ousy and envy, which are universal af fective structures.47 The mechanism of mediated desire is the central af fective mechanism of sociogenesis (Girard). There is also another ef fect of  the Third in triangulation. Perceiving the gaze of  the Third observing the First and Other is a specific position within inter-subjectivity, because the Third brings an element of indirectness and distancing observance into the play. The Third acts therefore as an interrupter of emotional escalations, of violence and counter-violence. So the basic experience of  being compared to another by the glance of  the Third is the af fective source of  the concepts of neutrality, equality, and justice. For every newcomer in the world, for every child, this process of  triangulation is not only a cognitive, but an emotional process, too; the experience of  the Other and the Third configures his or her imagination; and it is possible to trace the way in which this complex social imagination (elaborated in fiction, in narratives, and dramas of jealousy, revenge, alliances and mediations) leads to family triangulation.48 From an experiential and imaginative background the ‘triangulation’ within family points toward the relevance of  the Third as a key figure in social theory.49 II.3.  The argument from transition from interaction to institution This argument is developed within the debate about the ‘missing link’ between micro- and macro-sociology: how do we analyse the transition from interaction among particular participants to institution as an anonymous societal force.50 This argument is brilliantly explored by Peter L. 47 Stenner/Stainton-Rogers, ‘Jealousy’ and Paul Stenner’s contribution in this volume. 48 Koschorke, ‘Ein neues Paradigma’. 49 Freud points out that family novels (Familienromane) run through all human social worlds, and in this thesis he not only refers to classic dramatists (e.g. Sophocles) but to the great novels of nineteenth-century bourgeois society. Cf. Girard, Deceit, Desire and the Novel. 50 The challenge is how to combine the Durkheim-tradition (with ‘institution’ as key term) with the Tarde-tradition (with ‘imitation’ as key term).

94

Joachim Fischer

Berger and Thomas Luckmann, combining the intellectual power of social phenomenology with the concept of emergence. They refer to the well established theory of institution (Durkheim, Gehlen) and attempt to reformulate the process of institutionalization by means of  the social phenomenology (Husserl, Schütz) of inter-subjectivity. At the core of  the argument they explicitly use Simmel’s concept of  the Third.51 They argue that dyadic interaction is necessary to reconstruct ‘habitualization’ and ‘typization’, but that social theory needs the Third in order to reconstruct the phenomenon of  ‘institution’. Two can establish rules and can change them: the rules are attributable to the two-party-relation, but only the observation of  these rules by a Third detaches the rules from the actors involved (and their perspectives) and makes the rules ‘objective’ – becoming now detached and estranged from all participants.52 Through the ef fect of a third party the social phenomenon becomes society. Such a Third will often be anonymous. For this reason the Third is the ‘missing link’ between interaction and institution. One can transfer this argument to bridge the gap between ‘dialogue’ (Gadamer) and ‘symbolic order’ (Lacan)/‘discourse’ (Foucault), or the gap between ‘double contingency’ and ‘social system’. At the level of dialogue or double contingency the Third is helpful (or, indeed, indispensable) for the reconstruction of  the emergence of  ‘symbolic order’ (LéviStrauss, Lacan) or ‘discourse’ (Foucault) or ‘social systems’ (Luhmann). On account of  this function between the levels of interaction and institution the Third should be postulated in social theory. II.4.  The argument from the range of  the Third This argument can be reformulated in the terms of  the modern theory of dif ference (Derrida, Serres). Already ‘the Other’ ‘bundles up’ – and conceals by the general concept – dif ferent configurations and functions of  the

51 52

Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of  Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of  Knowledge (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1966). This argument was first developed by Litt, Individuum und Gesellschaft.

Turn to the Third

95

dyad (cooperation, exchange, conf lict, imitation, intimacy, care, friendship etc.). Alterity is a dubious phenomenon, showing all traces of ambiguity between ‘amicus’ and ‘enemy’, of  transition from ‘co-worker’ to ‘slave’, from hate to indif ference or love. But the ambiguous configurations of alterity do not exhaust the complexity of  the human world. Every sociocultural world has already a lot of distinct triadic figures and configurations which can be reduced neither to alterity nor to each other. Think for instance of  the roles of  the translator, interpreter, messenger between sender and receiver, rival, trickster, mediator, the arbiter or the judge, the third-party adjudication, the stranger, the suf fering third or the scapegoat (tertius miserabilis), the ally in a coalition, the real winner (laughing third), the parasite, the agent, the representative, the traitor, the schemer, divide et impera, the hybrid, the configuration of majority/minority (there can be no majority or minority between two, it only has meaning with the appearance of  the Third).53 These figures and configurations cannot be explained by dyadic interaction, but nor do they need a fourth or further party to be postulated in order to be satisfactorily analysed.54 One needs ‘tertiarity’55 in order to understand the emergence of  these complex configurations. The Third moves all the above mentioned triadic configurations together, in order to dif ferentiate the dif ferences. Only by this operation can social theory explain the socio-cultural world in its full complexity. From the viewpoint of  the actual range and richness of  triadic figurations in the socio-cultural world, the consideration of  the Third is as relevant for social theory as the Other.

Special attention to the mediator, the arbiter and the real winner is given by Simmel, ‘The Quantative Aspect of  the Group’, to the parasite and the messenger by Serres, Parasite, and to the scapegoat by Girard, Violence and the Sacred. 54 Simmel, ‘The Quantative Aspect of  the Group’. 55 I first introduced this term as a concept in social theory in Fischer, ‘Der Dritte’, 104. 53

96

Joachim Fischer

III.  The turn to the Third: Ontological and methodological     consequences for the humanities and the social sciences These four arguments alone (and they are arguments which cannot be reduced to one another) make the Third indispensable in the foundation of social theory. The Third is as relevant as ego and alter ego. ‘Tertiarity’ proves as relevant as alterity and identity. The Third, or ‘tertiarity’, is a supplement to alterity and identity: it is one step ahead. At the same time it is a step between alterity and plurality. The Third is another Other, which produces new functions and configurations, while a fourth or further figure only repeats dyadic and triadic constellations in complex formations of plurality. What are the consequences for, or benefits to, the humanities and the social sciences of systematically taking the Third into consideration? III.1.  Ontological transformation Firstly, there are consequences for the ontological stance of  these disciplines: their position on the ontological status of  the ‘objects’ they deal with. The Third allows this particular group of disciplines both to understand institutionalization through the Third, that is, the emergence of society (institution, structure, system, discourse) and also explain institutionalization of special configurations of  the Third through the dif ferentiations which this society performs – the development of complex societies. The potential of  the Third helps us solve a crucial problem in handling the socio-cultural world at large. It helps us explain – as already mentioned in argument II. 3 – the inevitable double aspect of interaction and institution,56 of micro- and macro-level sociology. With the Third as a tool

56

Arnold Gehlen, Man, His Nature and Place in the Word, trans. Clare McMillan and Karl Pillemer; with an introduction by Karl-Siegbert Rehberg (New York: Columbia University Press 1988). For a new interpretation of  the institution from the standpoint of  life philosophy see Robert Seyfert, Das Leben der Institutionen. Zu einer

Turn to the Third

97

in the analysis, it is no longer necessary to play action-theory of f against systems-theory, or dialogue-theory against discourse-theory, or vice versa. In real society, of course, the institution – or the ‘trans-subjectivity’ of  ‘discourse’ or ‘social system’ – is structurally antecedent to interaction, for instance in the mother-child-dyad. But this cannot prevent social theory (in order to respond to the intellectual challenge) from reconstructing social order in gradation. So, to answer the key question of  the institutionalization of social order: the combination of  the self and the other initiates inter-subjectivity, but only with the introduction of  the third party does the institution, or the symbolic order, or the discourse, or the social system, come into being. The interaction of  two depends on their mutual existence and their presence, but with the appearance of  the Third the individuals tend to be replaceable, the relationship becomes continuous, the rules exist principally independently of (or ‘alienated’ from) the individual wills of  those involved: interaction emerges as society. In this perspective Lacan’s ‘big’ Other shows as the big Third instance, and Mead’s ‘generalized other’ should be renamed as ‘generalized third’. Roles are installed, norms are established, the social life gains stability – and subjectivity owes its formation to this anonymous society. But the other way round, one can grasp the paradox: the concrete Third, who acts in the inter-subjectivity only as the transition to the abstract trans-subjectivity, to the realm of  the ‘objective’ institutions and discourses, re-emerges at the micro-level of macro-society, because such a real, anonymous and alienated society needs embodiment of institutions, and third agents on the microlevel emerge as an incarnation of  the macro-level – they are the faces of  the institutions, with scope for decision in open situations. Based on the understanding that the Third is a precondition of institutionalization, now the institutionalization of specific dyadic and dif ferent triadic configurations can become the object of enquiry. This is an innovation in social theory, because armed only with the notion of  the Other the humanities and the social sciences could not fully analyse certain aspects of 

allgemeinen Theorie der Institutionalisierung (Weilerswist: Velbrück Wissenschaft, 2011).

98

Joachim Fischer

the socio-cultural world. Of course configurations of the Other are already a store of social constellations and show a large range of dif ferent possibilities, which are used by societies as social operators: to set out division of  labour, structures of exchange, care, love, friendship, and conf lict – complex configurations which are predicated on the existence of  the Other. But the humanities and the social sciences are stymied by the poverty of  their basic dyadic theory. Following a purely dyadic model of ego and alter ego one can grasp that two can love one another or quarrel, can work together or trade, and therefore the humanities and the social sciences, using this dyadic social theory, can get a hold upon such concepts as division of  labour or of exchange, or of morality, or of conf lict, or of care, within the socio-cultural world; but the purely dyadic model cannot grasp dif ferent complex social systems – for instance, the concept of market, or of  law and court, or of media institutions, or of political institutions. To explain the market we need the role of  the rival (and the triggered competition for customers), to explain the court we need the judge (the conf lict-regulating instance of mediation and arbitration), to explain the media we need the messenger (the independent instance between sender and receiver who have no direct communication), to explain the political system we need the concepts of inclusion/exclusion, of coalition, of majority/minority, interrupting central hierarchy.57 These are all configurations which cannot be explained with exclusive reference to ego and alter ego and the third realm of culture. In order to explain inter-culturality we need the indispensable translator, to explain the public sphere one needs the listener, the viewer, the audience witnessing – for instance – the drama of jealousy or the public debate, performed by advocates. From the viewpoint of dyadic social theory, which operates only with the relationship of ego and alter ego and the third realm of culture, language, symbolic order etc., these above mentioned social systems of  human life appear as secondary, as abstract or alienated spheres 57

Thomas Hobbes develops a crucial argument for the function of  the Third (the occupier, the sovereign) in politics: the all-powerful state is legitimated as the interrupter of violence and counter-violence, in order to stop the mutual escalation between ego and alter ego, and is accepted by both in this third role: Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Richard Tuck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).

Turn to the Third

99

– compared with the authentic dyads of interaction and communication. But if  the Third is properly established in the foundation of social theory as is the Other, these spheres can be analysed and investigated as already extant basic elements of  the socio-cultural world. Social phenomena such as family, market, law, state, communication media, inter-culturality demand configurations beyond dyadic relational forms. Establishing the Third as a prerequisite for reciprocity or intersubjectivity, the humanities and the social sciences can observe how society, both in socio-cultural actuality and also in imagination, includes within itself within the configurations of  the Other (master-slave, cooperation, exchange, conf lict, imitation, intimacy, care etc.) as well as in configurations of  the Third (rivals, tricksters, parasites, mediators, arbiters). Societies from the beginning use these dyadic and triadic configurations as social operators, and through this diverse patterning of social systems the heterarchic and polycentric nature of modern societies emerges. By this ontological transformation, caused by the ref lection on the Third, the various disciplines within the humanities and social sciences attain a broader basis of social ontology for their research. There are, however, more ontological innovations made possible by the systematic consideration of  the Third, and these concern the socio-cultural constitution of subjectivity – or the inner world – and the ‘construction’ of  the outer world or nature. It belongs to their scientific autonomy that the humanities and the social sciences claim that the socio-cultural world is prior to subjectivity and prior to the existence of  the outer world. That is due to the axiom that subjectivity – or the inner world – does not create itself, but is constituted and mediated by the Other, that alterity is already within the essence of any identity. By the systematic consideration of  the Third, the nature of subjectivity can be observed more accurately. The antinomic structure between the I (as undeveloped impulse) and me (as the orientating representation of  the Other in the subject)58 is supplemented by

58 Mead, Mind, Self, and Society.

100

Joachim Fischer

internalizing what we might call, in Helmuth Plessner’s terms,59 the ‘excentric’ viewpoint between ‘I’ and ‘me’, a viewpoint from which there can be observed the whole gamut of  the roles of  the Third (from neutral spectator to parasite to judge) within identity which make for complex subjectivity. Consideration of  the Third can also help us explain our socio-cultural approaches to the outer world in a new way. It can of fer an explanation of  the existence of various ‘world views’ (including scientific and narrative world views), each of which can give rise to a wide variety of structures and images characterized by concepts of  the ‘threefold’, ‘ternary’, ‘triads’, or ‘thirdness’. Returning to the human experience of real or imaginative triangulation (which enables, and gives complexity to, any socialization of  human beings) one can see that thirdness and binarity amount together to the minimal degree of experiential complexity necessary for ordinary human socialization, and that the relation between them is therefore both an innate and a productive model for shaping the structure of world views, for cultural semiosis.60 This supposition is supported by Peirce’s theory of sign, the matrix of semiosis, which is characterized by sign-relations (‘firstness, secondness and thirdness’): sign, object, and ‘interpretant’.61 The Third as elaborated by myth, theology, philosophy, literature, or scientific systems may wear many masks and play many roles:62 as an agent who draws a distinction between two sides, as hero of  transgression and mediation, as a translator, as a stage in the development of synthesis, as a force breaking down symmetry or polarity, as a joker beyond dualism.63 59 Plessner’s term is excentric positionality, see Helmuth Plessner, Die Stufen des Organischen und der Mensch. Einleitung in die philosophische Anthropologie (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1965 [1928]). 60 Reinhard Brandt, D’Artagnan und die Urteilskraft. Über ein Ordnungsprinzip der europäischen Kulturgeschichte (Stuttgart: Steiner, 1991). 61 Charles Peirce, ‘The List of  Categories: A Second Essay’, Collected Papers of  Charles Sanders Peirce, vols 1–6, ed. Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss, vols 7–8, ed. Arthur W. Burks (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1931–58), 1.328, c.1894. 62 Georges Dumézil, Mythos und Epos. Die Ideologie der drei Funktionen in den Epen der indoeuropäischen Völker (Frankfurt/Main: Campus, 1989). 63 See for the narratology of  the Third: Albrecht Koschorke, ‘Ein neues Paradigma der Kulturwissenschaften’ (2010); Bernhard Malkmus, ‘Vom Hoch- und Tiefstapeln. Der

Turn to the Third

101

III.2.  Methodological transformation We conclude by sketching out some methodological consequences for the humanities and the social sciences. As explained at the outset, the approach of  this group of disciplines to their ‘object’ (the socio-cultural world) is not the self-ref lection of subjectivity (as in transcendental philosophy), nor the subject-object-relation (of  the natural sciences), nor the revelation of  the transcendent Third (as in theology). This group of disciplines relies upon inter-subjectivity in its epistemological economy. Dyadic social theory, as an important theory of  the socio-cultural sciences, proceeds from a methodological approach with ‘understanding’ as a necessary component. This follows the model of inter-subjectivity, because one subject (the scholar) understands a document or a monument as an ‘expression’ of  the Other, of  his manifest or latent ‘intention’. The systematic consideration of  the Third within social theory now shifts the epistemology from ‘understanding’ to ‘the observer’. The key methodological basis of  the humanities and the social sciences is now the observation of an understanding relationship between ego and alter ego. With the addition of  the Third to the tools of analysis, it can be seen that every relation in inter-subjectivity is already observed, or rather that such concepts as ‘interaction’, ‘exchange’, ‘reciprocity’, ‘communication’, and ‘double contingency’, work and function only as observed relationships, observed from the viewpoint of  the Third. The model now contains the observer of a relationship: the onlooker of an interaction or (with reference to Freud) the voyeur of an intercourse – the observing third person. This seems to be the social origin of  the ‘impartial spectator’. The Third is simultaneously neutral and involved: it is outside and inside, both observing and interfering. These ‘second-order observations’64 constitute an important

Picaro zwischen den Systemen der Moderne’, in Thomas Bedorf, Joachim Fischer, Gesa Lindemann, eds, Theorien des Dritten. Innovationen in Soziologie und Sozialphilosophie (Munich: Fink, 2010), 289–315. 64 Luhmann, Social Systems.

102

Joachim Fischer

and indispensable methodological basis for social theory and an epistemological point of reference for the humanities and the social sciences. It is only through these ‘second-order observations’ that these disciplines can make legitimate claims to be a self-description of society.

Part II

Philosophy

Andreas Dittrich

The Absent Third: Negative Dialectics in Adorno’s and Derrida’s Accounts of  Cognition and Language

I Theodor Adorno’s Negative Dialectics was written between 1959 and 1966 and is substantially based on three lectures given in 1961 at the Collège de France in Paris. Its intellectual genesis is inextricably intertwined with the Aesthetic Theory, which was due to be completed in 1968 and published posthumously in 1970. By that time, Jacques Derrida’s core writings, Writing and Dif ference and Of  Grammatology (both 1967), had only recently appeared. Despite their shared aim – a critical reinterpretation of  Hegelian dialectics and aesthetics from a conceptual and linguistic point of view – the two thinkers create two seemingly divergent paradigms of post-dialectical thinking. In this essay, I shall attempt to elucidate an (anti-)Hegelian concept that unites both approaches: the figure of negative dialectics. In Derrida’s interpretation, Hegel is ‘also the thinker of irreducible dif ference’, the ‘last philosopher of  the book and the first thinker of writing’.1 In other words, he is the creator of a fundamental line of  thought (what Derrida calls dif férance) that has to be rigorously pursued and secured against its initial idealistic triplicity. Likewise, Adorno’s Negative Dialectics

1

Jacques Derrida, Of  Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, corrected edn (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 26; De la grammatologie (Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 1967), 41. Henceforth cited as GR; the first page number refers to the English translation, the second one to the original.

106

Andreas Dittrich

works both with and against Hegelian dialectics: ‘Every concept, even that of  Being, reproduces the dif ference of  thinking and the thought’.2 Both thinkers aim at a fundamental conceptual paradox: any thought that is entertained is analytically a thought of something; it aims analytically at a non-conceptual entity. In Negative Dialectics, ‘“something” – as a cogitatively indispensable substrate of any concept’ (ND, 135/139)3 – and in Derrida’s parallel formula, ‘the signification “sign” has always been understood and determined, in its meaning, as sign-of, […] a signifier dif ferent from its signified’.4 Yet the intended ‘something’, the envisaged item as such, is not fully identifiable – neither by a cognitive concept nor by a linguistic sign. Consequently, the Hegelian dialectical movement between concept, content and intended item fails to come to a halt; it gains a paradoxical and negative force as ‘the consistent sense of non-identity’ (ND, 5/17), or the ‘unnameable movement of dif ference-itself      ’ (GR, 93/142).5 The figure of  the Absent Third in Negative Dialectics and in Of  Grammatology is therefore construed as a logical means for the deconstruction of  familiar concepts of  language, knowledge, and cognition. My aim is to clarify the outlines of  this conceptual paradox, stressed both by Adorno’s philosophy of self-ref lection and Derrida’s philosophy of self-dif ferentiation, mainly by focusing on its linguistic implications. In section II, I will consider essential features of  the concepts of  ‘about-ness’ and intentionality imbricated in these views on the relation of  language, mind, and world. Section III is devoted to Adorno’s and Derrida’s notions 2

3 4

5

Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E.B. Ashton (New York: Seabury, 1973), 175. Original in Negative Dialektik, 10th edn (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 2000), 176. Henceforth cited as ND; the first page number refers to the English translation, the second one to the original. The original reads: ‘Das Etwas als denknotwendiges Substrat des Begrif fs’. Jacques Derrida, Writing and Dif ference, trans. Allan Bass (Chicago: University of  Chicago Press, 1978), 281. Original in L’écriture et la dif férence (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1967), 412: ‘Car la signification “signe” a toujours été comprise et déterminée, dans son sens, comme signe-de, signifiant renvoyant à un signifié, signifiant dif férent de son signifié’. Henceforth cited as WD; the first page number refers to the English translation, the second one to the original. De la grammatologie, 142: ‘Ce mouvement innommable de la dif férence-même’.

The Absent Third

107

of negativity and dif ference and to the specific Hegelian heritage that is consistently remodelled by these figures of negative dialectics. In what sense language provides privileged access to the conceptual paradox, and to what extent philosophical language is af fected by it, will be taken into account in section IV. In section V, I will address some broader implications raised by these concepts of negative dialectics, pertaining primarily to the pragmatic issues of context and indexicality.6

II The point of departure is an attractive picture: we construct mental models of  the world, based on the set of cognitive concepts we possess; and we express features of  these models by means of  linguistic concepts, referential expressions, and meaningful sentences. According to this familiar view, a mental concept identifies something (i.e. a non-conceptual entity or state of af fairs) as something (i.e. a conceptual or propositional content). Concepts and mental models are about something, they are intentionally directed towards something else. Accordingly, acts of speech, statements and sentences inherit this property of about-ness from underlying mental states. In particular, the referential intention is founded on intentionality.

6

My analysis is therefore deliberately restricted to Of  Grammatology, Writing and Dif ference and Negative Dialectics. For a thematic and historical extension of  this scope see the critical assessments in: Zeynep Direk and Leonard Lawlor, eds, Jacques Derrida: Critical Assessments of  Leading Philosophers (London: Routledge, 2002), Simon Jarvis, Adorno: A Critical Introduction (New York: Routledge, 1998), Max Pensky, ed., The Actuality of  Adorno: Critical Essays on Adorno and the Postmodern (Albany: State University of  New York Press, 1997), Jack Reynolds and Jonathan Rof fe, eds, Understanding Derrida (New York: Continuum, 2004). Gillian Rose, The Melancholy Science: An Introduction to the Thought of  Theodor W. Adorno (New York: Columbia University Press, 1978), Nicholas Royle, Jacques Derrida (London: Routledge, 2003).

108

Andreas Dittrich

The cognitive pattern can be linguistically restated: a sign, a meaningful linguistic expression for instance, identifies something (i.e. a non-linguistic entity, be it a concept or a thing) as something (i.e. a signified content). Linguistic expressions are about something: they signify a thing or a concept, a state of af fairs or a proposition. About-ness therefore appears to be an essential feature of cognitive concepts and, likewise, of  linguistic signs. In other words, referential directedness is analytically part of our concept of a mental concept and, in parallel, of our concept of a linguistic sign. But this simplified notion of cognitive or linguistic about-ness entails inextricable complexities which quickly arise at second glance. What is it that we intend to grasp by a concept – say the concept ‘tree’? The conceptual content ‘tree’ as far as it fits into our mental categories of  the world or the tree as such, the spatiotemporally located physical object? What is it that is intentionally aimed at by a linguistic sign? Is it a signified content or a non-linguistic entity as such (say the tree as a real thing or as a concept)? The answer depends on underlying theoretical claims on how mind and language relate to each other and to the world. In Derrida’s and Adorno’s interpretations, conceptual contents presuppose a mental system of concepts, linguistic contents (like meanings) presuppose a linguistic system of signs (i.e. certain rules of syntax and semantics). This may lead to the conclusion that conceptual and linguistic contents have to be systematically kept apart from the items concepts or signs intentionally aim at. Yet Adorno’s and Derrida’s sceptical conclusions are more far-reaching: (i) concepts necessarily fail to identify the items they are analytically about: the things as such (Adorno); (ii) signs likewise necessarily fail to identify the items they are analytically about: the things or the concepts as such (Derrida). Our concept of a concept and, likewise, our concept of a sign, seems to be inherently paradoxical since concepts are analytically concepts of things as such (while merely identifying conceptual contents), and signs are analytically signs of items as such (while merely identifying linguistic contents). The three-place predicates that are implied by these notions of  ‘sign of’ (a linguistically signifies b as c) and of  ‘concept of’ (a conceptually identifies b as c) seem to hint at a fundamental paradox which is inherently part of our conceptual as well as of our linguistic grip on the world. In Negative

The Absent Third

109

Dialectics, Adorno not only gives an analysis of  the paradoxical movement between identity and non-identity, between concept and content, but also seeks to define a mode of philosophical investigation which takes the nonconceptual object of conceptual identification seriously. On the level of philosophical meta-language, the conceptual paradox is obviously reiterated since philosophical concepts are concepts as well; being analytically understood as concepts of something, they inherit the inconsistency of identification they analyse. Consequently, the transcendental dif ference or non-identity between content and thing as such is destabilized and gains a negative momentum which likewise applies to the theory of negative dialectics as a sub-area of conceptual analysis in general: The name of dialectics says no more, to begin with, than that objects do not go into their concepts without leaving a remainder, that they come to contradict the traditional norm of adequacy. Contradiction is not what Hegel’s absolute idealism was bound to transfigure it into: it is not of  the essence in a Heraclitean sense. It indicates the untruth of identity, the fact that the concept does not exhaust the thing conceived. Yet the appearance of identity is inherent in thought itself, in its pure form. To think is to identify. Conceptual order is content to screen what thinking seeks to comprehend. The semblance and the truth of  thought entwine. […] Since that totality is structured to accord with logic, however, whose core is the principle of  the excluded middle, whatever will not fit this principle, whatever dif fers in quality, comes to be designated as a contradiction. Contradiction is nonidentity under the aspect of identity; the dialectical primary of  the principle of contradiction makes the thought of unity the measure of  heterogeneity. As the heterogeneous collides with its limit it exceeds itself. Dialectics is the consistent sense of non-identity. It does not begin by taking a standpoint. (ND, 5/17)

Neither a consistent idealistic interpretation of  the distinction between concept, content and thing, nor a consistent interpretation of  how these notions relate, is at hand. The notion of conceptual or logical consistency itself is not acceptable. Consequently, any representational approach to the relationship between language, mind, and world is doomed to fail as well: ‘representational thinking would be without ref lection – an undialectical

110

Andreas Dittrich

contradiction’ (ND, 207/206).7 Mental images as a third item between thinking and the thought are therefore subject to a philosophical ‘ban on images’. In Adorno’s theory, any concept is analytically directed towards the non-conceptual ‘indissoluble something’ as such, the logical complement of  the content it conceptually grasps: ‘Without specific thoughts, thinking would contravene its very concept, and these thoughts instantly point to entities’ (ND, 136/139).8 In a similar systematic move, Derrida rejects representational and pictorial thinking. In Of  Grammatology, written or spoken language is not conceived to be a transparent representation of concepts, senses or things. On the contrary, the model of representation, which is seen to be an essential feature of  the epistémè (the conceptual and linguistic system that is implied by our most fundamental understanding of  linguistics, science or philosophy), is one of  the chief  targets of deconstruction: ‘This, strictly speaking, amounts to destroying the concept of  “sign” and its entire logic’ (GR, 7/16).9 The deconstruction of  the binary distinction between ‘signifier’ and ‘signified’ and the attempt to establish a willingly inconsistent logic of  the ‘supplement’, the ‘dif ferance’ or the ‘trace’, are meant to object to familiar models of logic, language, and cognition by arguing both against them and within their own framework: But all these destructive discourses and all their analogues are trapped in a kind of circle. This circle is unique. […] There is no sense in doing without the concepts of metaphysics in order to shake metaphysics. We have no language – no syntax and no lexicon – which is foreign to this history; we can pronounce not a single destructive proposition which has not already had to slip into the form, the logic, and the implicit postulations of precisely what it seeks to contest. To take one example from many:

7 8 9

The original reads: ‘Abbildendes Denken wäre ref lexionslos, ein undialektischer Widerspruch’. The original reads: ‘Denken widerspräche schon seinem eigenen Begrif f ohne Gedachtes und dies Gedachte deutet vorweg auf  Seiendes’. See Henry Staten, Wittgenstein and Derrida (Lincoln: University of  Nebraska Press, 1984) on Derrida: ‘And one of  the things we learn by reading his texts is that the “logos” in “logocentric” cannot be understood simply in relation to speech. Logos must first be understood in relation to eidos, “form”, a concept that occupies a far more important place in metaphysical thematics than does speech’ (xiv).

The Absent Third

111

the metaphysics of presence is shaken with the help of  the concept of sign. But, as I suggested a moment ago, as soon as one seeks to demonstrate in this way that there is no transcendental or privileged signified […], one must reject even the concept and word ‘sign’ itself – which is precisely what cannot be done. For the signification ‘sign’ has always been understood and determined, in its meaning, as sign-of, a signifier dif ferent from its signified. If one erases the radical dif ference between signifier and signified, it is the word ‘signifier’ itself which must be abandoned as a metaphysical concept. (WD, 280–1/412)

The use of systematic language in this account embraces important ambiguities which become particularly salient when restated in a way that preserves the distinction between linguistic and conceptual content. Expressions like ‘language’, ‘syntax’, ‘lexicon’, ‘pronounced proposition’, ‘the word “sign” itself ’, ‘the signification “sign”’, ‘the word “signifier” itself ’ are clearly taken from the linguistic register. In contrast, the wording of  ‘concepts of metaphysics’, ‘form’, ‘logic’ and ‘implicit postulations’, ‘the concept of sign,’ ‘the concept “sign”’ or ‘a metaphysical concept’ (attributed to ‘the word “signifier”’!) hint at a conceptual mode of speech. Accordingly, there seems to be an ambiguity in key expressions like ‘concept’, ‘signified’, ‘proposition’ or ‘form’, which can be read both in a logical and in a linguistic mode. These puzzling ambiguities af fect the implied notion of about-ness. Adorno interprets the notion ‘concept of ’ as a three-place predicate: (i) a (cognitive concept) conceptually identifies b (intentional item as such) as c (cognitive content); concepts are about non-conceptual entities. Likewise, Derrida reads the notion ‘sign of ’ as a three-place predicate: (ii) a (linguistic concept) linguistically identifies b (intentional item as such) as c (linguistic content). Given the cognitive-linguistic double-talk in Derrida’s Of  Gramma­ tology, it is not said that (ii) is merely a derivative linguistic structure which inherits underlying features from a cognitive structure (i). On the contrary, Derrida seems to operate on a level as fundamental as Adorno’s. The variable ‘b’ in (i), the intended item as such (the ‘signified’) has two systematically distinct interpretations: it either means ‘concept’, ‘sense’, ‘noeme’ or it means ‘(ideal) object’, ‘thing’, ‘reality’ (GR, 18/30). The latter interpretation seems to render Derrida’s account (ii) partially equivalent to Adorno’s account (i), whereas the former appears to stick to the linguistic realm

112

Andreas Dittrich

proper. Consequently, structure (ii) and structure (i) may have an equivalent logical form, but their interpretations allow for a certain asymmetry. To further elucidate this relatedness, the underlying notions of negativity and dif ference have to be singled out.

III Negative dialectics is both a mode of  thinking or philosophical investigation and an interpretation of what ‘thinking’ means. What is at stake is our concept of  linguistic or mental content itself. Derrida’s view of self-dif ferentiation as well as Adorno’s view of self-ref lection is conceived to question the very basis of  thinking and saying by means of  thought and language, i.e. by analysing the inherent paradox of cognition and language from an inside point of view. The intentional paradox arises from the presumption of cognitive about-ness; the referential paradox obtains only when this presumption is applied to the linguistic realm. But, Adorno and Derrida argue in unison, we are logically unable to attain an outside perspective: all we have is the cognitive or linguistic content. Intentional objects have a transcendental status insofar as we cannot reach them independently of cognitive or linguistic systems. What we capture when entertaining a thought or uttering a sentence is the content or meaning; but the analytical goal of  thinking or saying are the items as such. This is why negative dialectics can only be self-ref lective thinking or saying. By focusing on the conceptual or linguistic paradox, a paradoxical mode of  thinking and saying is unleashed: a mode that is meant to provide us with a more adequate picture of  how language, mind, and world relate. The model of negative dialectics is intended to distract us from several prima facie assumptions we are all too easily attracted to when describing our epistemic or cognitive situation. If a concept fails to identify the object it is analytically engaged with (Adorno) and a sign fails to identify the item (the concept, the thing) it is analytically linked to (Derrida), cognition and

The Absent Third

113

language are both subject to a constitutive negativity. The persistent process of self-dif ferentiation in Of  Grammatology and the incessant process of self-negation in Negative Dialectics are attempts to provide the most farreaching interpretation of  this negative aspect: Adorno conceives negative dialectics to be ‘a critique of  the foundation concept’ as such (ND, xix/9), while Derrida’s deconstruction of  the logocentric epistémè attacks the very notion of a (transcendental) origin: ‘The origin of  the speculation becomes a dif ference’ (GR, 36/55).10 By criticizing the most fundamental philosophical and linguistic concepts from an inside perspective, Of  Grammatology strives to establish a negative ‘Hegelianism without reserve’: The blind spot of  Hegelianism, around which can be organized the representation of meaning, is the point at which destruction, suppression, death and sacrifice constitute so irreversible an expenditure and a negativity without reserve – that they can no longer be determined as negativity in a process or a system. In discourse (the unity of process and system), negativity is always the underside and accomplice of positivity. Negativity cannot be spoken of, nor has it ever been except in this fabric of meaning. […] Even while taking into account their value as ruptures, it could be shown, in this respect, that the immense revolutions of  Kant and Hegel only reawakened or revealed the most permanent philosophical determination of negativity (with all the concepts systematically entwined around it in Hegel: ideality, truth, meaning, time, history, etc.). The immense revolution consisted – it is almost tempting to say consisted simply – in taking the negative seriously. In giving meaning to its labor. (WD, 259/380)11

10 11

The original reads: ‘L’origine de la spéculation devient une dif férence’. The orignal reads: ‘La tache aveugle de l’hegelianisme, autour de laquelle peut s’organiser la représentation du sens, c’est ce point où la destruction, la suppression, la mort, le sacrifice constituent une dépense si irréversible, une négativité si radicale – il faut dire ici sans réserve – qu’on ne peut même plus les déterminer en négativité […] Dans le discours (unité du procès et du système), la négativité est toujours l’envers et la complice de la positivité. On ne peut parler, on n’a jamais parlé de négativité que dans ce tissu du sens. […] Tout en tenant compte de leur valeur de rupture, on pourrait montrer que les immenses révolutions de Kant et de Hegel n’ont fait à cet égard que révéler la détermination philosophique la plus permanente de la négativité […]. L’immense révolution a consisté – on serait presque tenté de dire tout simplement – à prendre au sérieux le négatif. A donner sens à son labeur’.

114

Andreas Dittrich

By highlighting the Hegelian aspect of negativity, Derrida destabilizes the logocentric perspective of absolute idealism: ‘Hegel is also the thinker of irreducible dif ference’.12 This dif ference, the irreducible ‘dif férance’ which creates sense and meaning and replaces the concept of a transcendental origin in Derrida’s theory of  language, is one of  the presuppositions of any conceivable philosophy within the framework of  the epistémè (even of  Hegelian dialectics itself ) (GR, 23/38). The transcendental status of  this – in the broadest sense – ‘linguistic’ principle of dif ferentiation has a systematic counterpart in Adorno’s negative dialectics of cognition: ‘Every concept, even that of  Being, reproduces the dif ference of  thinking and the thought’ (ND, 175/176).13 This unnameable dif ferential movement hinders any dissolution of  the antagonistic dialectics between concept, content, and thing. As opposed to Hegelian dialectics, the idea of negative dialectics refuses to achieve something positive by means of negation. On the contrary, the Hegelian triadic scheme (‘The third would be no less deceptive’, 175/177) is sacrificed for the sake of a consistently reiterated,

12

13

In Hegel’s conception, negativity (as ‘self-related dif ference’) is a condition of possibility of self-present subjectivity which itself  founds the concepts of identity and dif ference. See G.W.F. Hegel, Phenomenology of  Spirit, trans. A.V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 18–19: ‘The activity of dissolution is the power and work of  the Understanding, the most astonishing and mightiest of powers, or rather the absolute power. […] But that an accident as such, detached from what circumscribes it, what is bound and is actual only in its context with others, should attain an existence of its own and a separate freedom – this is the tremendous power of  the negative; it is the energy of  thought, of  the pure “I”’; original in Phänomenologie des Geistes, ed. Hans-Friedrich Wessels and Heinrich Clairmont (Hamburg: Meiner, 1988), 35: ‘die ungeheure Macht des Negativen; es ist die Energie des Denkens, des reinen Ichs’. This passage is also quoted in Negative Dialektik, 159. See Theodor W. Adorno, Drei Studien zu Hegel (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1971), Jacques Derrida, ‘La dif férance’, in Marges de la philosophie (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1972), 1–30. See also Nina Belmonte, ‘Evolving Negativity: From Hegel to Derrida’, Philosophy & Social Criticism 28/1 (2002), 18–58. The original reads: ‘Jeglicher Begrif f, noch der des Seins, reproduziert die Dif ferenz von Denken und Gedachtem’.

The Absent Third

115

unstoppable process of negation and dif ferentiation.14 As in Derrida’s Of  Grammatology, this negative dialectical move is seen to be a means for liberating Hegel of  his misinterpretation of  his own philosophical premises. While Hegel’s principles of dif ference and negativity are systematically extended in Negative Dialectics, his notions of identity and synthesis are excluded from philosophical investigation: The only way out of  the dialectical context of immanence is by that context itself. Dialectics is critical ref lection upon that context. It ref lects its own motion; if it did not, Kant’s legal claim against Hegel would never expire. Such dialectics is negative. Its idea names the dif ference from Hegel. In Hegel there was coincidence of identity and positivity; the inclusion of all nonidentical and objective things in a subjectivity expanded and exalted into an absolute spirit was to ef fect the reconcilement. On the other hand, the force of  the entirety that works in every single definition is not simply its negation; that force itself is the negative, the untrue. The philosophy of  the absolute and total subject is a particular one. (ND, 141–2/145)15

While Adorno intentionally commits ‘an of fence to the logic of noncontradictoriness’ (ND, 136/139)16 with his concept of mutual transgression, Derrida introduces a notion of  ‘absolute dif ference’ and ‘arche-trace’ which 14 The original reads: ‘Das Dritte tröge nicht minder’. On the reassessments of  the Hegelian concepts of dif ference and negativity by Derrida and Adorno, see further: Gary K. Browning, ed., Hegel’s Phenomenology of  Spirit: A Reappraisal (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1997), Rodolphe Gasché, The Tain of  the Mirror: Derrida and the Philosophy of  Ref lection (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), Irene E. Harvey Derrida and the Economy of  Dif férance (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), Michael Rosen, Hegel’s Dialectic and Its Criticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), Yvonne Sherratt, Adorno’s Positive Dialectic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). 15 The original reads: ‘Nichts führt aus dem dialektischen Immanenzzusammenhang hinaus als er selber. Dialektik besinnt kritisch sich auf ihn, ref lektiert seine eigene Bewegung; sonst bliebe Kants Rechtsanspruch gegen Hegel unverjährt. Solche Dialektik ist negativ. Ihre Idee nenne ich die Dif ferenz von Hegel. Bei diesem koinzidierten Identität und Positivität […]. Demgegenüber ist die in jeglicher einzelnen Bestimmung wirkende Kraft des Ganzen nicht nur deren Negation sondern selber auch das Negative, Unwahre’. 16 The original reads: ‘Der Logik der Widerspruchslosigkeit bliebe es anstößig’.

116

Andreas Dittrich

‘is in fact contradictory and not acceptable within the logic of identity’ (GR, 61/90).17 A critical assessment of  the lines of argument in Negative Dialectics and Of  Grammatology could easily show that Adorno’s and Derrida’s philosophical modes of presentation are neither non-logical nor ‘non-linguistic’. In countless instances, the mode of saying profits from logical moves, semantic implications, and rhetoric strategies. But both Derrida and Adorno admit that their theories of  language and cognition cannot be formulated outside general cognitive and linguistic systems. Dialectical thinking is dialectical thinking; and even a grammatology is a gramma­tology as well as grammatology. On the other hand, what is intended is a change of perspective: from the predominance of sense, concepts or things to a reassessment of writing and the material sign in Derrida’s case; from the predominance of concepts and logic to the ‘object’s preponderance’ in Adorno’s. This does not mean that the dialectical movement of conceptual self-ref lection or of  linguistic self-dif ferentiation comes to a halt. On the contrary, by stressing the systematic importance of  the intentional object as such, Adorno’s concept of an incapable ‘something’ as ‘trace’ (Spur) (ND, 103/110) seems to be equivalent to Derrida’s concept of  the absent ‘something’ as ‘trace’ (trace). Both Derrida’s concept of dif ferential dialectics and Adorno’s concept of ref lective dialectics are systematically designed to reject any kind of prioritizing and of spotting one of  the dialectical counterparts in a privileged way. ‘Consistent’ negative dialectics (which in itself seems to be a contradiction in terms) does not entitle us to pin down one of  the poles: neither the concept nor the object, neither the signifier nor the signified. Yet this is only half of  the truth. Adorno points out that both cognitive identification (S conceptually ascribes feature a to object b) and linguistic identification (S linguistically ascribes feature a to object b) presuppose a ‘something’ which is ‘there’ independently of any conceptual or linguistic identification: ‘There is no extinguishing the trace of entity in the formal-logical “something”’ (ND, 103/110).18 From this statement 17 18

See also Marian Hobson, Jacques Derrida: Opening Lines (London: Routledge, 1998). The original reads: ‘Unauslöschlich ist dem formal-logischen “Etwas” die Spur des Seienden’.

The Absent Third

117

follows a surprising move: whereas any object is conceivable as independent of a conceiving subject, any subject is itself analytically also an object: ‘To be an object also is part of  the meaning of subjectivity; but it is not equally part of  the meaning of objectivity to be a subject’ (ND, 183/185). This asymmetry appears to cancel the idea of a relentlessly pursued negative dialectics, as Adorno’s materialistic preponderance on the object gives priority to the intended item as such, over and above our conceptual grasp of it. The concept of a concept analytically entails that linguistic or cognitive concepts are themselves, qua conceptuality, tied to the sphere of  the non-conceptual. But the object’s preponderance has to be regarded as an additional claim. This move is not wholly conclusive in the framework of a negative dialectics; it marks one of  the striking dif ferences between Negative Dialectics and Of  Grammatology. In his conceptual and linguistic account, Derrida clearly rules out this very risk of prioritizing: neither the signifier, i.e. the sign as material object, nor the signified, i.e. the concept or intentional object, can gain logical priority. The three-place structure ‘a signifies b as c’ itself analytically presupposes that the logical priority of  the sign over the signified would entail that the signifier ‘signifier’ would not have any possible signified at all. This view is in keeping with a rigorous conception of negative dialectical dif férance. Yet these considerations reach beyond the realm of  linguistic signification. How they are more specifically implied by Adorno’s and Derrida’s analyses of  the relationship between language, cognition, and system has to be taken into account in the next step.

IV Concepts apply to things which, in turn, instantiate concepts. An individual token, a tree for example, can be taken to be an instance of  the concept ‘tree’. Nonetheless, Adorno would argue, all we possess is the ‘tree’ as conceptual content and as an instance of a conceptual schema. Likewise, predicates like ‘is green’ apply to subjects like ‘the tree’ which, in turn, instantiate

118

Andreas Dittrich

predicates. In Derrida’s view, all the subject covers is the linguistic content which presupposes a system of signs. Linguistic structures partially mirror conceptual structures. And, in a sense, linguistic expressions like words or sentences are intuitively more explicit and more accessible to philosophical investigation than mere mental entities like concepts or propositions. Dialectics, as Adorno points out, originally belongs to the realm of  logico-linguistic investigation, while the Hegelian approach neglected the linguistic sphere of dialectical thinking: ‘Dialectics – literally: language as the organon of  thought – would mean to attempt a critical rescue of  the rhetorical element’ (ND, 56/66). Negative dialectics, which stresses the incessant process of dif ferentiation between identity and non-identity and which has an anti-systematic orientation, is primarily a mode of saying, a linguistic mode of philosophical expression that is apt to track conceptual dialectics. This is why Adorno and Derrida do not regard language as a transparent means for conveying propositional contents, but as a way of modelling dialectical or deconstructive reasoning by a dialectical use of words. In Derrida’s case, the ‘grammatology’ (a ‘science of writing’), which is meant to criticize the ‘logocentric’ conditions of  thinking and saying, intentionally does not ‘have the form of logic but that of grammatics’: ‘Before being its object, writing is the condition of  the epistémè’ (GR, 27–8/43). In Adorno’s approach, ‘the [linguistic] presentation of philosophy is not an external matter of indif ference to but immanent to its idea’ (ND, 18/29).19 Linguistic concepts are therefore the primary ‘bearers’ of nonlinguistic concepts, and language can provide a sort of privileged access to the conceptual paradox of negative dialectics. Derrida likewise takes into account that ‘the problem of  language has never been simply one problem among others’ (GR, 6/15),20 and erects the whole edifice of  his 19

On Adorno’s concepts of  language, truth, and meaning see J.M. Bernstein, ‘Negative Dialectic as Fate: Adorno and Hegel’, in Thomas Huhn, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Adorno (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 19–50. 20 De la grammatologie, 15: ‘Le problème du langage n’a sans doute jamais été un problème parmi d’autres’. See Peter Uwe Hohendahl, Prismatic Thought: Theodor W. Adorno (Lincoln: University of  Nebraska Press, 1995), 217–42, for a critical distinction between Adorno’s and Derrida’s approach to language: ‘As tempting it may

The Absent Third

119

grammatology upon a metaphysically extended linguistic foundation. The deconstructionist act of reading and act of speech is an attempt to overcome the logocentric perspective of  the ‘presence’ which is said to be inscribed in any language system – be it the language of  formal logic or the natural language of everyday life. Derrida’s core thesis concerning the relatedness of  language, mind, and world is the following: any structured language system logically presupposes a structural centre which is transcendental to the structure itself; as every signified (be it a concept, a thing, a sense, an ‘origin’) is part of  that system of signification and dif ferentiation (and therefore only a ‘supplement’, a ‘trace’ of  the transcendental signified), the movement of signification fails to come to a halt. The figure of  the absent third therefore gains the virtue of an anti-Hegelian paradox inherent in our system of  language, grammar, and linguistic cognition: The representativist concept of writing facilitates things. If writing is nothing but the ‘figuration’ […] of  the language, one has the right to exclude it from the interiority of  the system (for it must be believed that there is an inside of  the language), as the image may be excluded without damage from the system of reality. […] External/ internal, image/reality, representation/presence, such is the old grid to which is given the task of outlining the domain of science. And of what science? Of a science that can no longer answer to the classical concept of the epistémè because the originality of its field – an originality that it inaugurates – is that the opening of the ‘image’ within it appears as the condition of  ‘reality’; a relationship that can no longer be thought within the simple dif ference and the uncompromising exteriority of  ‘image’ and ‘reality’, of  ‘outside’ and ‘inside’, of  ‘appearance’ and ‘essence’, with the entire system of oppositions which necessarily follows from it. (GR, 33/50)21

21

be to interpret Adorno’s position as close to and compatible with poststructuralist thought by using the category of negative dialectics as the mediating turn, this path would ultimately lead us away from Adorno’s conception, since it neglects the specific constellation out of which his concept of  truth emerged. […] An indication of  the dif ference is Adorno’s continued insistence on the need for conceptual language.’ See Samuel C. Wheeler III, Deconstruction as Analytic Philosophy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 7: ‘For Derrida, this shows that something is wrong with our whole notion of  “making sense of ”. Deconstruction is the exposition of  the failure of  “making sense” in the philosophical sense’.

120

Andreas Dittrich

Derrida’s Of  Grammatology is a fundamental meta-linguistic critique of any view in linguistics or philosophy of  language that is based on stable binary oppositions – be it in the realm of  linguistic expression or in the realm of conceptual analysis. If statements or propositions are taken to be what is expressed by sentences and also what can be the object or content of a person’s thoughts, Derrida’s deconstruction attacks the essential ingredients of reasoning and of  logical argumentation: sentences, statements, meanings, and concepts. It is not the context-dependency, the indexicality of referring expressions (like ‘I’) or the conf lict between propositional content and linguistic form that causes the systematic instability, but the specific about-ness and negativity of any language system as such. Adorno likewise highlights that ‘the work of philosophical self-ref lection consists in unravelling that paradox’ and that ‘everything else is signification, […] pre-philosophical activity’ (ND, 9/21).22 On the other hand, he develops a cognitive and linguistic model of  ‘constellations’ which – contrary to Derrida’s decentred and destabilized structure – are potentially apt to grasp what the conceptual content fails to cover. Philosophy itself is construed in these terms: The unifying moment survives without a negation of negation, but also without delivering itself  to abstraction as a supreme principle. It survives because there is no step-by-step progression from the concepts to a more general cover concept. Instead, the concepts enter into a constellation. The constellation illuminates the specific side of  the object, the side which to a classifying procedure is either a matter of indif ference or a burden. The model for this is the conduct of  language. Language of fers no mere system of signs for cognitive functions. Where it appears essentially as language, where it becomes a form of representation, it will not define its concepts. It lends objectivity to them by the relation into which it puts the concepts, centered about a thing. Language thus serves the intention of  the concept to express completely what it means. By themselves, constellations represent from without what the concept has cut away within: the ‘more’ which the concept is equally desirous and incapable of 

22 The original reads: ‘Die Arbeit philosophischer Selbstref lexion besteht darin, jene Paradoxie auseinanderzulegen. Alles andere ist Signifikation, Nachkonstruktion, heute wie zu Hegels Zeiten vorphilosophisch’.

The Absent Third

121

being. By gathering around the object of cognition, the concepts potentially determine the object’s interior. (ND, 162/164–5)

Under the assumption that ‘consistent’ negative dialectical thinking and reasoning contains an essential linguistic component, this move is quite astonishing. The use of natural language, which neither unambiguously defines its words nor structurally mirrors a cognitive system by means of a consistent linguistic system, is regarded as a model for adequate philosophizing. Constellations of words, expressions, sentences or utterances are taken to ‘express completely’ what concepts ‘mean’, i.e. are intentionally about. Does this mean there is a remedy to Derrida’s and Adorno’s paradox of  linguistic about-ness (‘the sign fails to identify the item it is analytically a sign of: the signified as such’) and, moreover, to Adorno’s paradox of cognitive aboutness (‘the concept fails to identify the item it is analytically a concept of: the object as such’)? Adorno’s constellational view of concepts seems to imply such a valid mode of  thinking the unthinkable and saying the unsayable: ‘to counter Wittgenstein by uttering the unutterable’ (ND, 9/21). Nonetheless, the whole concept of negative dialectics as a dialectics of  the absent third seems to rigorously rule out such a positive perspective. For Derrida, the use of natural language cannot serve as a model for dif ferential thinking or saying, since it is subject to the very logico-linguistic categories that negative dialectical philosophizing seeks to overcome. But it can be argued that the entire enterprise of deconstruction is about finding a language which is aware of  the absence of a privileged referent or of a transcendental signified. Anti-systematic saying or writing is neither detachable from logical forms, premises and implications, nor separable from linguistic forms, modes of expression and utterances. It is rather a way of ref lecting internal paradoxes and of altering conventional constellations. Is this aim of internal self-ref lection or self-dif ferentiation attainable? This seems to be logically (or linguistically) excluded if negative dialectics accepts fundamental rules of  logic and language. That it does accept them in the very event of uttering their non-acceptability is in itself an intriguing paradox.

122

Andreas Dittrich

V Just as Derrida and Adorno cast doubt on the very concepts of  truth, meaning and logic (without actually abandoning these realms), so they also discard a considerable range of  linguistic and philosophical distinctions attached to the various interpretations of  these notions. A whole plethora of questions could be addressed within these conceptual frameworks. To name but a few: how are language, truth, and meaning related? How can logical and grammatical form be distinguished? Which account of meaning and reference is plausible? What is the relation between cognitive concept and linguistic meaning? What can be said about the distinction between sentence, statement, and utterance (i.e. between language form and language use)? In what ways are speaker, hearer, and utterance contextually interdependent? The limited framework of  this paper does not allow us to enter into any of  these specific issues. From the viewpoint of a philosopher of  language or a linguist, both Adorno’s account of selfref lexive thought and utterance and Derrida’s account on self-dif ferential thinking and writing are far too general and elusive to contribute fruitfully to ongoing in-depth debates. One of  the manifold reasons for this is that the writings at stake in this investigation – Of  Grammatology, Writing and Dif ference, and Negative Dialectics – do not suf ficiently exploit their pragmatic implications. Core issues of pragmatics like communicative intentions, implicatures or speech acts are neglected in these models of  language-based negative dialectics. Yet some topics of pragmatics and ordinary language philosophy, mainly non-truth-conditional aspects of meaning and contextual implications, are clearly implied by the issues analysed in sections II to IV. Both Derrida and Adorno criticize metaphysical dogmatism by criticizing metaphysical language. The conditions of possibility of meaning, truth, intention, and context are at stake. Adorno rejects a use of identifying concepts that suppresses dif ferences between instances. The proposed remedy is a use of  language that remains aware of non-identified contents: ‘Dialectics – literally: language as the organon of  thought – would mean to attempt a

The Absent Third

123

critical rescue of  the rhetorical element, a mutual approximation of  thing and expression, to the point where the dif ference fades’ (ND, 56/66). Derrida’s concept of a ‘dif férance’ seeks to avoid metaphysical language intended to express a self-present meaning or truth. Its component of  ‘iterability’ disrupts the concept of a fixed context that would determine a set of rules governing signification. Nonetheless, what a grammatology is looking for is a mode of  language that connects text and context and takes the contextual features of its own (historically shaped) concepts into account (WD, 291/425).23 This essential contextuality of a negative dialectical thinking which takes non-conceptual aspects seriously is claimed equally in Adorno’s self-characterization: ‘The inner historicity of  thought is inseparable from its content, and thus inseparable from tradition’ (54/64).24 The point made by language philosophers that sentences only have meanings or truth-conditions as statements being uttered in a particular context is a vital insight. One and the same sentence can be used to make dif ferent speech acts with dif ferent contents. Hence, sentence meaning, utterance meaning, and propositions have to be kept apart to avoid confusing dif ferent layers of expressing meaning. Not only linguistic meanings determine utterance meanings, but also a variety of non-truth-conditional components such as types of speech acts, the speaker’s attitudes and intentions or the situational context of an utterance. What is said is more complex than what is asserted, as the semantic and logical implications of what is said are superseded by pragmatic implications and their rules of  language use. Negative dialectical thinking and saying can itself  be interpreted as a mode of speech (or writing) which is self-contradictory primarily in a pragmatic, rather than logical, sense. It is a mode of utterance which in the event of asserting cancels what it asserts. This does not mean that a specific negative dialectical speech act can be defined, but a paradoxical use of  language is not necessarily the same as paradoxical meaning or logic – it 23

See Simon Glendinning, ‘Inheriting ‘Philosophy: The Case of  Austin and Derrida Revisited’, Ratio 13/4 (2000), 307–91; Stanley Cavell, Philosophical Passages: Wittgenstein, Emerson, Austin, Derrida (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), 42–65. 24 The original reads: ‘Innere Historizität des Denkens ist mit dessen Inhalt verwachsen und damit der Tradition’.

124

Andreas Dittrich

may rather denote a pragmatically paradoxical mode of utterance. This is why pragmatic implications and contextual factors cannot be ignored by negative dialectics. ‘Context’ can be conceived of as a set of various situational factors relevant to fixing the meaning of  the context-sensitive constituents of a sentence. For instance, the place and time of utterance, the identity, attitudes and intentions of  both of  the speaker (writer) and hearer (reader) are contextual factors. Indexical expressions are a special case in point. The reference of  ‘I’, for instance, is determined by the rule that ‘I’ refers to the speaker, irrespective of  the speaker’s identity, intentions or beliefs. This kind of use-conditional meaning is context-dependent, but still governed by a rigorous rule of use, as ‘I’ token-ref lexively indicates that it refers to the speaker. It is a directly referential expression whose reference shifts from utterance to utterance. Descartes’ famous ‘Ego Cogito’ contains the indexical ‘I’ and gives rise to fundamental philosophical issues such as the nature of self-knowledge and consciousness. Can the far-reaching distinction between extra-linguistic context, indexical referent, and indexical content be cancelled in the way of  Derrida’s ban on self-present selfhood and Adorno’s repulsion of any conceptual priority of  the subject? According to Derrida, even the self-presence and immediate self-transparency of  the thought ‘I think’ are paradigms of metaphysical concepts of  truth und meaning which have to be dismissed. With a dif ferent twist, Adorno rejects the Hegelian self-present transcendental subject and the idea of a meaningindependence of concepts: ‘The pronoun “my” [in “my thoughts”] points to a subject as an object among objects, and again, without this “my” there would be no “I think”’ (ND, 183/185).25 Whether these rather dogmatic claims are really valid for a pragmatically extended picture of  language, truth, and meaning is an open question. As noted earlier, the reference of a pure indexical like ‘I’ is not determined by the speaker’s thoughts, actions or intentions. Besides rules of logics and meaning, rules of  language use necessarily apply in such an act of speech.

25

See Albrecht Wellmer, Zur Dialektik der Moderne und Postmoderne: Vernunftkritik nach Adorno (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1993).

The Absent Third

125

Is this observation an instance of  how we are trapped in the f ly bottle of our logico-linguistic epistémè? If self-ref lexive as well as self-dif ferential thinking and saying is somehow analytically incapable of exceeding the limits of  the logico-linguistic realm, the logical status of such a criticism ‘from within’ is very restricted. Negative dialectical modes of expression are an important device for changing perspectives and overcoming overly restrictive viewpoints. But the positive contribution of such a paradoxical way of  thinking and saying to the undertaking of clarifying questions of  language and cognition is hard to assess.

VI To conclude, the figure of negative dialectics as an anti-Hegelian figure of  the absent third is one of  the basic concepts of  Adorno’s philosophy of selfref lection and of  Derrida’s philosophy of self-dif ferentiation. According to Negative Dialectics, our concept of a concept analytically entails that mental concepts identify something (i.e. a non-conceptual entity or state of af fairs) as something (i.e. a conceptual content); yet concepts necessarily fail to identify the items they are analytically about: the things as such. According to Of  Grammatology, our concept of a sign analytically entails that linguistic signs identify something (i.e. a non-linguistic entity, be it a concept or a thing) as something (i.e. a signified content); yet signs necessarily cannot identify the items they are analytically about: the things or the concepts as such. This structurally parallel paradox of cognition (concepts are analytically concepts of items they fail to grasp) and language (signs are analytically signs of items they fail to cover) is used to launch a fundamental critique of any philosophy of cognition and language which is not based on the paradoxical movement between concept, content, and intentional object. In both Adorno’s Negative Dialectics and Derrida’s Of  Grammatology, the figure of negative dialectics means an anti-Hegelian

126

Andreas Dittrich

(and, at the same time, truly consistently Hegelian) paradox inherent in our systems of  language and cognition. Yet this clear-cut structural similarity likewise contains a considerable range of inconsistencies, open questions, and ambiguities. As has been shown, Adorno’s and Derrida’s ref lections on truth, meaning, and reference lead into inextricable complexities and lack essential features of  the pragmatic dimension of  language use. The logical status of negative dialectical thinking and saying itself is unclear. In many ways, Adorno’s and Derrida’s negative dialectical concepts and modes of  language use are close to their ref lections on the nature of aesthetics and aesthetic interpretation. But one of my reasons for restricting my analysis to Of  Grammatology, Writing and Dif ference, and Negative Dialectics was that philosophical discourse is not thought to be an instance of aesthetic discourse – neither by Derrida nor by Adorno. Adorno sees ‘a playful element’ which is ‘not accidental to philosophy’, but ‘cogent insights’ of philosophy are nonetheless submitted to ‘the concept – the organon of  thinking, and yet the wall between thinking and the thought’ (ND, 14–15/25–7). For Derrida, deconstructive thinking is ‘the Nietzschean af firmation, that is the joyous af firmation of  the play of  the world’; it remains open to the ‘seminal adventure of  the trace’ (WD, 292/427). The essentially tripartite figure of negative dialectics is thus playfully directed against a logocentric metaphysics of  ‘presence’ (the presence of  the substance, the self-presence of  the ego cogito, the co-presence of  the other and the conscious self, etc.), but is nonetheless characterized – as Adorno puts it – by ‘solidarity between such thinking and metaphysics at the time of its fall’ (ND, 408/400).26

26 The original reads: ‘Solches Denken ist solidarisch mit Metaphysik im Augenblick ihres Sturzes’.

Guido Naschert

The Problem of  Antinomy and its Pragmatic Dimension in Early Romantic Philosophy

I In the mid-nineteenth century the German philosopher Eduard von Hartmann published his treatise Über die dialektische Methode (On the Dialectical Method ). There he complains that it is impossible to lead the dialectical thinker into absurdity (in the form of a reductio ad absurdum), for this reason: dialectical reasoning starts at the very point where other people think reasoning is rendered absurd by a contradiction.1 Indeed, the principle of non-contradiction is a necessary condition of human argumentation, and it is from a logical point of view easy to prove that you can draw any conclusion from any premise once you have dropped the principle. This leads to a self-immunization which makes reasoning dogmatic. As Jakob Friedrich Fries remarked about the lectures of  Friedrich Schlegel, this is like a ‘slap in the face for common sense’.2 Rational talk about dialectical ‘figures of  the third’ has to take this objection seriously. If  the ‘Third’ means not simply a metaphor, a problem of arbitrary classification or an indication of something ambivalent or vague which is not simply this or that, but the determinate result of a necessary way of reasoning, forcing us to a resolution of contradictions, then it must be possible to point out 1 2

Eduard von Hartmann, Über die dialektische Methode (Berlin: Duncker, 1868), 43. Cf. Ernst Ludwig Theodor Henke, Jakob Friedrich Fries: Aus seinem handschrift­ lichen Nachlasse dargestellt (Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1867), 74: ‘Jetzt liest auch Friedrich Schlegel hier Transcendentalphilosophie und hat nicht übel angefangen, die gesunde Vernunft zu ohrfeigen.’

128

Guido Naschert

the limits of  logical reasoning in a strict sense, and it must be necessary to provide us with valid rules in our further reasoning beyond the realm of  binary logic. The dif ferent forms of dialectical thinking in German letters around 1800 can be understood as attempts to provide us with such rules. They all agree with the claim that the principle of non-contradiction is valid in the area of everyday argumentation and academic debate, but has to be suspended in our thinking about the ultimate concepts of god, world, society and (inter-)subjectivity. And they all perform this transgression of  logic with a rhetorical pathos and enthusiasm which should indicate that in this form of reasoning we could reach the real ‘sources of  the truth’. Recently I have made some attempts to contextualize the philosophical works of  Friedrich Schlegel and tried to combine the traditional form of intellectual biography with the philological practice and method of  ‘Konstellationsforschung’.3 It is not my intention, in this paper, to delve too deeply into the historical contexts. My attempt is rather to characterize the early Romantic dialectic (Schleiermacher, but especially Schlegel) and to demarcate it from its Idealistic alternative (Hegel) by asking: (1) how they justify their transgression of  logic, (2) how they provide us with a ‘method’ of dialectical reasoning and (3) how they solve their key speculative problem: the problem of infinity.4

3

4

Guido Naschert, Friedrich Schlegels philosophische Lehrjahre: Untersuchungen zu den Traditionsbezügen und Innovationen der Frühromantik (Berlin, New York: De Gruyter, 2013). This is part one of  Schlegel’s intellectual biography. The second part will follow soon. On ‘Konstellationsforschung’ see Martin Mulsow, and Marcelo Stamm, eds, Konstellationsforschung (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 2005), and Dieter Henrich, Werke im Werden: Über die Genesis philosophischer Einsichten (Munich: Beck, 2011). See for further reading Andreas Arndt, Dialektik und Ref lexion: Zur Rekonstruktion des Vernunftbegrif fs (Hamburg : Meiner, 1994); ‘Pragmatische Dialektik’: Frühromantische Hermeneutik und Selbstref lexion der Moderne’, in Erwin Hufnagel and Jure Zovko, eds, Toleranz, Pluralismus, Lebenswelt (Berlin: Parerga, 2004), 51–68; Ernst Behler, Studien zur Romantik und zur idealistischen Philosophie, 2. vols (Paderborn: Schöningh, 1993); Michael Elsässer, Kritik am Ding: Ein Grundzug der Philosophie Friedrich Schlegels (Hamburg: Meiner, 1994); Markus Enders, ‘Das romantische Unendlichkeitsverständnis Friedrich Schlegels’, Deutsche Vierteljahresschrift

The Problem of  Antinomy and its Pragmatic Dimension

129

II Before we are able to discuss this, a more detailed context is required. My guiding idea is rooted in an experience I had when I observed various scholars explain Hegelian dialectic. Thomas Kesselring, for example, in his study Die Produktivität der Antinomie, tries to compare Hegel with Jean Piaget.5 In this context he suggests that Hegel’s transgression of  the realm of  formal logic is to be seen in the light of  the dif ficulties of  hand­ ling paradoxes and antinomies. Hegel’s concept of synthesis as a form of double negation − an absolutely true concept is the result of a negation of  the negation − inherits the properties of self-reference and negation. That is very close to the source of  familiar antinomies. For example, if one person says to another: ‘Please don’t pay any attention to me!’, then this sentence is paradoxical: you have to pay attention to the speaker to realize that you should not pay attention to him. And this happens because the sentence is self-referential in a negative way. Of course it is easy to solve this type of contradiction: you may do it chronologically, if you assume that it is not intended to refer to the present but as a statement for the future. Or you can simply ignore it.

5

für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte 74 (2000), 44–83; Zum Begrif f der Unendlichkeit im abendländischen Denken: Unendlichkeit Gottes und Unendlichkeit der Welt (Hamburg: Kovač, 2009); Manfred Frank, ‘Unendliche Annäherung’: Zu den philosophischen Anfängen der Frühromantik (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1997); Bärbel Frischmann, Vom transzendentalen zum frühromantischen Idealismus: J.G. Fichte und Fr. Schlegel (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2005); Hans Krämer, ‘Fichte, Schlegel und der Infinitismus in der Platondeutung’, Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte 62 (1988), 583–621; Ulrike Zeuch, Das Unendliche: Höchste Fülle oder Nichts? Zur Problematik von Friedrich Schlegels GeistBegrif f und dessen geistesgeschichtlichen Voraussetzungen (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 1991); Jure Zovko, Friedrich Schlegel als Philosoph (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2010). Thomas Kesselring, Die Produktivität der Antinomie: Hegels Dialektik im Lichte der genetischen Erkenntnistheorie und der formalen Logik (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1984).

130

Guido Naschert

What Kesselring (and after him Dieter Wandschneider6) emphasizes is the following: if we are interested in reconstructing dialectical thinking in a rational way that at the same time respects the enormous ambition and claim of such thinking, then we should do this by reconstructing it as a form of dealing with specific non-arbitrary and non-empirical types of antinomy. This means reconstructing it as an a priori logic of antinomies. Antinomies are a non-trivial sort of contradiction, where A implies non-A, and non-A implies A [A ←→ ¬A]. I am not interested here in discussing special formal antinomies like the set M of all sets, which does not imply itself; or the famous liar who is lying if  he does not lie and not lying if  he is. I am only interested in the fact that these contradictions are not straightforwardly false, because they do not violate logic. The logical objection − mentioned at the beginning − that anything follows from a contradiction, does not fit here, because the terms cannot be separated of f. The terms of an antinomic contradiction in a dialectical sense belong necessarily together, because − the important point by Kesselring − they imply themselves in a negative and self-referential way. Dieter Henrich had called this earlier an ‘autonomous negation’.7 Later philosophers with Hegelian inclinations, like Wandschneider, have criticized this, and said that we have to focus more on the pragmatic dimension of  the formation of antinomies. This leads us to the concept of pragmatic contradictions between pragmatic form and content or act and content. What happens if we regard early Romantic dialectic in the same way? Are there traces of  the concept of pragmatic and self-referential negation in Schlegel or Schleiermacher? Or is this concept the giant Hegelian leap which demarcates the two forms of dialectic?

6

7

Dieter Wandschneider, ‘Das Antinomienproblem und seine pragmatische Dimension’, in H. Stachowiak, ed., Pragmatik, vol. 4 (Hamburg: Meiner, 1993), 320–52; Grundzüge einer Theorie der Dialektik: Rekonstruktion und Revision dialektischer Kategorienentwicklung in Hegels ‘Wissenschaft der Logik’ (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1995). Cf. Dieter Henrich, ‘Hegels Grundoperation: Eine Einleitung in die Wissenschaft der Logik, in U. Guzzoni et al., eds, Der Idealismus und seine Gegenwart: Festschrift für Werner Marx zum 65. Geb. (Hamburg: Meiner, 1976), 208–30.

The Problem of  Antinomy and its Pragmatic Dimension

131

III Even if one only takes a short glance at Schlegel’s lectures on Transcendental­ philosophie, which he delivered at Jena in 1800, it seems evident that his ideas stress much more the pragmatic and communicative aspect of the issue than Hegel’s did. In his notebooks, we can trace this line back to the end of 1796, which could be regarded as the origin of  the Schlegel-Schleiermachertype of dialectic.8 Early Romantic ‘Dialectic’ derives from the Greek word dialegesthai (διαλέγεσθαι), and it means a techné − an art, not a science, and not a mere ‘illusion’ as Kant uses the word in a negative sense − an art of communicating the truth. It means a dialogical searching for the truth, a specific way of  formulating problems, refuting and validating claims.9 But the Romantic talk is not pure endless searching, because the Romantic search does come to an end. The dialectical method not only searches for but reaches the truth, although a dif ferent truth if we look at the results and the ultimate foundations in Schlegel’s or Schleiermacher’s texts. It is not accidental that Schlegel, like Schleiermacher, develops his concept in line with Plato. The dialectical strain of reasoning was one of  their main interests in translating the Platonic dialogues. Hence the dialectical projects are at the heart of  the German Romantic revival of  Platonic philosophy. One can prove this philologically through the details 8

9

Both shared rooms from the end of 1797 outside the Oranienburg gate at Berlin. Schleiermacher read Schlegel’s notebooks several times, and the dif ferent manuscripts of  his later lectures show sometimes similar, but frequently the same argumentation, so we can regard him for the moment as the great ‘executor’ of  Schlegel’s will (‘Testamentsvollstrecker’), as Friedrich Gundolf called him once, cf. Friedrich Gundolf, Romantiker (Berlin: Keller, 1930), 265. Cf. KFSA, vol. 18, 509, nr. 50: ‘Sehr bedeutend ist der Griech.[ische] Nahme Dialektik: Die ächte Kunst (nicht der Schein wie bey K[ant]), sondern die Wahrheit mitzutheilen, zu reden, gemeinschaft.[lich] die Wahrheit zu suchen, zu widerlegen und zu erreichen (So bey Plato Gorg.[ias] − cf. Aristoteles); ist ein Theil der Philosophie oder Logik und notwendiges Organ der Philosophen’. KFSA = Ernst Behler, et al., eds, Kritische Friedrich Schlegel Ausgabe (München, Paderborn, Wien: Schöningh, 1958f f.).

132

Guido Naschert

of  Schleiermacher’s translations of  Greek terminology. Even Schlegel, who inaugurated this project, wrote introductions to dialogues such as the Parmenides, in which he treats Plato’s method. He writes, ‘that it was always most important to Plato to give a systematic construction of  fundamental concepts’ (‘Grundbegrif fe’).10 The interesting term in this quote is ‘construction’, because it is the aim of  the early Romantic type of dialectic to give a proper and justified form of construction of  the principles of  knowledge. And this construction is neither arbitrary nor necessarily demonstrated, only cleverly justified. It belongs to a post-Reinholdian and post-Fichtean philosophical constellation.11 This group of people − such as Aenesidemus Schulze, Johann Benjamin Erhard, Friedrich Immanuel Niethammer, Friedrich Carl Forberg12 − are sceptical about closed systems and about a type of systematic reasoning where such systems are founded through single principles (‘Grundsätze’). But how should we begin our philosophical enterprise without a definite starting point? I would like to reconstruct it in the following way: everyone who shares the philosophical dialogue has to be committed to the desire for total knowledge.13 That is a very Romantic expression of  the mere fact of argumentation, and one can claim that it is a dialogical version of  Kant’s ‘fact of reason’. If  there are ‘sophists’ who deny this Romantic

10 Cf. KFSA vol. 18, 532: ‘Platon geht auch hier auf dasjenige aus, worauf er überall dringt und was ihm immer das wichtigste ist, auf eine systematische Konstruktion der ersten Grundbegrif fe’. 11 Extensively demonstrated by Manfred Frank in ‘Unendliche Annäherung’, passim. 12 See my edition of  his philosophical writings, documents and letters: Friedrich Carl Forberg, Philosophische Schriften, 2 vols (Paderborn: Schöningh, forthcoming 2013). 13 Cf. Guido Naschert, ‘Friedrich Schlegel über Wechselerweis und Ironie (Teil 1)’, Athenäum: Jahrbuch für Romantik 6 (1996), 47–90, ‘(Teil 2)’, ibid. 7 (1997), 11–36. See also the critique of my interpretation by Robert S. Leventhal: ‘Transcendental or Material Oscillation? An Alternative Reading of  Friedrich Schlegel’s Alternating Principle (Wechselerweis)’, Athenäum: Jahrbuch für Romantik 17 (2007), 93–134. He rejects my attempt to describe Schlegels ‘Grundlehre’ as a fundamental pattern of argumentation. My aim was not to reduce Schlegel’s argument again to a single principle, but to explain the struggle of  fundamental concepts. I would like to thank Robert Leventhal for his comments on this paper.

The Problem of  Antinomy and its Pragmatic Dimension

133

desire, the philosopher tries to show that their claim results in a pragmatic contradiction between the act and the content. This contradiction is false, because you can and must avoid it. It results from a negative self-reference, but not to that type of necessity mentioned above. This is very important, because it shows Schlegel’s clear awareness of  these dif ferent types of contradiction. At this level the dialectic does not give common sense a slap in the face. Further it shows that the Romantic concept of  ‘Symphilosophy’ is found through dif ferent refutations in an apagogic sense.14 If one denies the presuppositions of philosophy, the attempt can only be answered with a medieval maxim from the disputational tradition: contra principia negantem non est disputandum.15 There is a special sort of commitment if you are participating in the Romantic symphilosophical discourse. It has a formal side: Schlegel speaks in his review of  Jacobi (1796) of  ‘the constitutive laws of reason’, meaning the principle of non-contradiction, the principle of suf ficient reason and the general supposition that it is possible to communicate knowledge.16 But there is more than a formal side: because you not only have to want to know, but to know everything. And that means not the infinite sum of individual facts, but the search for a coherent unity and totality of  knowledge, which only results from finding a centre.17 Schlegel’s and Schleiermacher’s Romantic dialectic starts by justifying ‘symphilosophy’ as a social practice of searching for a centred totality of  knowledge. And they continue this search through dif ferent steps which lead to a basic knowledge forming

14

15 16 17

One can call this a ‘transcendental pragmatic’ foundation. In the second part of my earlier articles I tried to explain, why ‘Symphilosophy’ in Schlegels perspective is also thought of as a solution of  Fichte’s, Schelling’s and Schaumann’s problems in the deduction of intersubjectivity. Romantic ‘Symphilosophy’ is a modern attempt to justify the unfounded socialitas of early-modern natural law. Cf. KFSA vol. 18, 514, nr. 95; 515, nr. 99. Cf. Naschert, ‘Friedrich Schlegel über Wechselerweis und Ironie (Teil 1)’, 71f f. I emphasize this aspect of centring knowledge, because it is very tempting to identify these ref lections with modern concepts of coherence theories of  truth, which of course are similar in their refutation of correspondence theories, but lack any centring of  knowledge in the Romantic sense.

134

Guido Naschert

the centre. All these steps are not demonstrated, they are only validated because the dialectic seeks after entitlements to do that.18 This procedure, which leads early Romantic dialectical reasoning from starting point to ultimate principle, is neither a semantic analysis nor a deductive syllogistic demonstration. It is a transcendental argument, a form of explication of  the implicit presuppositions of  the desire for total knowledge. In Schlegel’s early version from 1796 it results in the basic presupposition: ‘Das Ich soll seyn’ (‘The I must be’).19 This sentence can be understood as expressing the infinite freedom of subjectivity in general. But it is not so easy. Schlegel writes: ‘Unser Selbst ist ein Wiederschein des Unendlichen’ (‘Our Self is a ref lection of  the Infinite’).20 But then he does not mean the pure experience of unlimited freedom, but the Infinite as the condition and the other side of  this individual experience. It is a product of  two dif ferent elements. Now we will come back to the dialectical configuration of  the third.

IV Schlegel divides his lectures on Transcendentalphilosophie into three systematic parts: (1) theory of  the world (i.e. nature as a product of  the infinite and the non-I), (2) theory of man, (3) return of philosophy to itself. In a letter from one of  his students, the philosopher, poet and physician Stephan August Winkelmann (1780−1806), we find a brief summary of  Schlegel’s lectures. Winkelmann reports that there are four parts because the third part − return of philosophy to itself − is divided into: 3.1 method of

18

It is not surprising that this sounds similar to the terminology of  Robert B. Brandom, Making It Explicit: Reasoning, Representing, and Discursive Commitment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994). 19 KFSA, vol. 18, 519, nr. 17. 20 Cf. KFSA, vol. 12, 24.

The Problem of  Antinomy and its Pragmatic Dimension

135

invention, 3.2 method of communication (‘Mitteilung’).21 Before discussing all these parts of  his philosophy, Schlegel gives us a short introduction. There he starts − as we have seen before − with the mere fact of searching for knowledge. (We do not search for a special knowledge, because in this case we would practise a special discipline of enquiry.) If  the sceptic agrees with this starting point of our argument we have to solve two problems: The first problem is to define the character of philosophy. For that purpose the dialectical virtuoso discusses some ‘aphorisms’, which means sentences without demonstration but of illustrational or expositional value.22 These are: (1) Philosophy starts with scepticism. (2) Philosophy has a tendency to the absolute. (3) Principles and ideas are the subject of philosophy. (4) The form of philosophy is absolute unity. If everyone agrees with this exposition of  the nature of philosophy, it is possible to define the second problem: finding the centre of all principles and ideas.23 This sounds mystical, and it is. It has similarities to the mystical abstraction from everything which shows the pure otherness of  God.24 But at the same time it is a modern idealistic way of reasoning. Because after the complete abstraction − which is of an arbitrary nature − you realize that you not only think the idea of infinity as something other to yourself  but also as the idea of your own consciousness. In this demonstration − and this is a very important and easily misunderstood point − the infinite is the first idea, and consciousness the second. It is immediately bound 21

Cf. Letter from Stephan August Winkelmann to Friedrich Carl Savigny from November 1800, in Ingeborg Schnack, ed., Der Briefwechsel zwischen Friedrich Carl von Savigny und Stephan August Winkelmann (1800−1804) mit Dokumenten und Briefen aus dem Freundeskreis (Marburg: Elwert, 1984), 104–5. 22 He probably adopted this term from the medical tradition of  Boerhaave via Ernst Platner, Philosophische Aphorismen nebst einigen Anleitungen zur philosophischen Geschichte, Ganz neue Ausarbeitung. Erster Theil (Leipzig: Schwickert, 1793). 23 This ‘modern’ centre serves as a renovation of a Socratic/Platonic systematic structure: we go beyond the realm of empirical experience up to the principles and ideas (anhodos) and afterwards we come down with this knowledge (kathodos) into the world again. 24 Cf. Dirk Westerkamp, Via negativa: Sprache und Methode der negativen Theologie (Munich: Fink, 2006).

136

Guido Naschert

to the feeling of  the sublime which is connected with the procedure of abstraction. This procedure can start anywhere but it results always in an ‘intellectual intuition’ (‘intellektuelle Anschauung’) of  the same concepts: infinity and consciousness. Is there any configuration of  the third here? Well, the concept of infinity can be further analysed. It is the product of  the indeterminate and the determinate. The concept of infinity in itself is a configuration of  two elements.25 At this point we are reaching the limits of  Schlegel’s virtuosity. His reasoning on infinity is a mixture of dif ferent concepts of infinity: first the mathematical one, which is infinitely addable, second the concept of  boundlessness, third the concept of necessity, fourth the concept of  fundamentality and so on. At this point we have to join in the later Hegelian laughter at this Romantic amateur. But to make the point clear: this is not so far from Hegel’s own form of reasoning as he later suggested. In his dialectical management of  the big concepts Schlegel tries a sort of experimental combination theory (ars combinatoria). He combines the concepts with the purpose of inventing new thoughts. A lot of remarks in his notebooks are of  that style. But what he is looking for over the years is not just rampant combination but a method of articulating problems in terms of  two alternative, but equally justifiable concepts in a necessary relationship. If  the concepts go round and round in a false and true circle, then he is looking for a third concept which is thought of as the middle. He calls it, alluding to the chemical experiments of  his time ‘the point of indif ference’ (‘Indif ferenzpunkt’). ‘This point of indif ference is to be regarded’, he wrote, ‘as the infinite approximation to both struggling elements or concepts’.26 That means the middle is itself  twofold. It is the progression to the maximum and the minimum at the same time.27 Schlegel scholarship has yet 25 KFSA, vol. 12, 20. 26 KFSA, vol. 12, 22. 27 Tobias Bube pays attention to the fact that Schlegel changes in that period from a three-term- to a four-term-dialectic; cf. Tobias Bube, ‘Prosthesis: Ansätze zu einer viergliedrigen Dialektik bei Friedrich Schlegel’, in Dirk Winkelmann and Alexander Wittwer, eds, Von der ars intelligendi zur ars applicandi: Festschrift Willy Michel (Munich: Iudicium, 2002), 34–59. That is an important point, but − and this

The Problem of  Antinomy and its Pragmatic Dimension

137

to reconstruct this method of reasoning logically, rather than just putting it into dif ferent contexts such as the older tradition of combination theory or infinitesimal mathematics, physics or chemistry of  the late 18th century. But that does not really explain how it actually works. A very promising way of reconstruction is to put it in the context of  logic and regard it as ‘conceptus reciproci’ (‘Wechselbegrif fe’, ‘reciprocal concepts’). That is the term found in the textbooks of  the logicians around 1800.28 It is possible to transform these reciprocal concepts into an inferential form such as ‘A implies non-A, and non-A implies A’. Schlegel sometimes but seldom speaks of  ‘reciprocal sentence’ (‘Wechselgrundsatz’).29 Schleiermacher’s method of dialectical construction is much more narrative and not so focussed on the finding of conceptual ‘points of indif ference’. In this Schlegel is much closer to Hegel. But the centre of  knowledge − as I call it above − is very similar. Schlegel and Schleiermacher agree that abstraction from the starting point of desire for knowledge leads to consciousness of  the infinite, and to self-consciousness, as necessary conditions for any knowledge. But Schleiermacher focuses on the dif ference between the elements and characterizes the fundamental feeling (‘Gefühl’) as a feeling of dependence.30 Schlegel does not disagree with the concept of  feeling, but understands it as a form of enthusiasm. Dialectical reasoning is necessary so that this enthusiasm in not lost.31 For this reason I would

Bube neglects – in order to discuss the prosthesis-theorem, one has to consider the relevance of  the Plotinian dialectic, from which the term derives, cf. Hans Joachim Krämer, ‘Über den Zusammenhang von Prinzipienlehre und Dialektik bei Platon: Zur Definition des Dialektikers in Politeia 534 B-C’, Philologus 110 (1966), 35–70 (54). 28 Johann Christoph Hof fbauer, Anfangsgründe der Logik (Halle: Hemmerde & Schwetschke, 1810), 52: ‘Wenn a und b sich gegenseitig einschließen, so sind sie Wechselbegrif fe (conceptus reciproci )’. 29 Cf. KFSA, vol. 18, 36, nr. 193. 30 Manfred Frank, ed., Friedrich Schleiermacher, Dialektik (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 2001), vol. 2, 287. 31 KFSA, vol. 12, 6.

138

Guido Naschert

contend − against the critique of  Markus Enders − that it is not nihilism.32 It is not an enthusiasm for empty infinity (that would be mystical nihilism), but rather a critical enthusiasm for the reciprocal relationship between infinity and the finite. Such enthusiasm has many Romantic forms of expression. Irony is one of  them. The Romantics agree that we have no syllogistic demonstration. Dialectical reasoning is no simple algorithm. Hegel seems to maintain that there exists an objective algorithm which we only have to follow in our ‘silent rooms of  thought’.33 But he never provides us with any necessary criteria, only with some conceptual conditions. Early Romantic dialectic and its idealistic sister deal with self-referential concepts, which refer to themselves in a negative way. Around 1800 in his lectures on Transcendentalphilosophie Schlegel tried to show that the third is a point of indif ference, which constitutes an infinite twofold relationship: the indeterminate has to become determinate, and the determinate has to become indeterminate. The sense of existence is that it always has to go in both directions. Only this reciprocal relationship could be called real.34 By contrast, Hegel emphasizes that this way of reasoning is not enough. One has to develop a serious science from this Romantic art of dealing with

32

Markus Enders agrees with statements by Ulrike Zeuch and Michael Elsässer that Schlegel’s concept of infinity has a completely non-traditional character and that it justifies no positive way of  thinking and living, but constitutes a subtle form of individualistic nihilism, which he rejects from a theological point of view: ‘Fällt aber die Unterscheidbarkeit der Ideen oder Elemente als der immanenten Strukturen des Unendlichen, dann wird dieses tatsächlich zu einem “ununterscheidbaren” und damit auch gänzlich unerkennbaren “Chaos”, das sich von dem Nichts nicht mehr unter­ scheidet. Das romantische Unendlichkeitspathos Friedrich Schlegels trägt daher bereits den Keim des Nihilismus in sich’. (‘Das romantische Unendlichkeitsverständnis Friedrich Schlegels’, Deutsche Vierteljahresschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte 74 (2000), 44–83, here 83.) 33 G.W.F. Hegel, Wissenschaft der Logik I [= Werke 5] (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1986), 23. 34 KFSA, vol. 12, 22. It is possible to connect this thought with scientific reasoning of  the period.

The Problem of  Antinomy and its Pragmatic Dimension

139

ultimate concepts. But without any pure conceptual criteria dialectic still remains a way of dialogical construction, which might be better understood in the Romantic framework.

V I do not think that we can solve any problem of antinomy in current logic by referring to early Romantic dialectic. Nor do I think that Schlegel simply did a better job than Hegel. My suggestion is that we should take the problems of antinomy as a compass which leads the reconstruction of  these Romantic speculations in a reasonable direction. Ernst Behler wanted to show that Schlegel’s lectures are a parody of  Fichte or Schelling.35 Many readers think that the romantics did not want to be systematic. But it is not enough to cite brilliant jokes or witty inventions if you want to take the enormous claim of  these dialectics seriously. The Romantics say that it is necessary to go beyond the realm of  logical reasoning to produce real a priori knowledge. And they justify a lot of sanctions on other people in this pretension. I understand people very well who regard this as a slap in the face of common sense.

35

Ernst Behler, ‘Friedrich Schlegels Vorlesungen über Transzendentalphilosophie Jena 1800−1801’, in Walter Jaeschke, ed., Transzendentalphilosophie und Spekulation: Der Streit um die Gestalt einer Ersten Philosophie (1799−1807) (Hamburg: Meiner, 1993), 52–71.

Benjamin Robinson

Two or Three? – A Case for Two

I.  The neglected Two Maybe it is intemperate of me, but I enjoy the idea of  taking a case for the figure of  the Two into the heart of a volume devoted to the figure of  the Three. My hope is that by staging an encounter between the Two and the Three in this context I can also illustrate some (perhaps unintended) consequences of  the latter figure. Of course, in the big picture of  things, I could hardly be hostile to the Three since, as the volume amply demonstrates, it is the figure of relation, comparison, negotiation, law, tradition, indeed, of deliberation and dialectics in general. At the same time, I feel the figure of  the Two gets banished too blithely to the hinterlands, where it is free to thrive, but to thrive in the barbaric isolation of invidious polemics, demotic prejudices, untamed instincts, and primal conf licts. As an outcast the Two becomes an evil double or an entrapping mirror, ref lecting us in the most inessential light. It adopts a savage attitude, unforgiving, unsubtle, and inf lexible. Its all-purpose binarism is simplistic, hierarchical, static, and instrumental. At least, these are the epithets it tends to fulfil when abandoned to its unenlightened habits – exiled to an unmediated realm of swagger and presumption, it behaves as if  there were never any remainder, as if  the world and its possibilities were fully exhausted by a structure of negation or disjunction such as true/false, possible/impossible, good/bad, or beautiful/ugly. But is such exile the destiny of  the Two? If  the cardinal sin of  the Two is to constrain all alternatives to a single unconscionable choice (according to the principle of  tertium non datur), then who is so free of sin to constrain the Two from polite, indeed humane society? Whose animosity is such to insist that our world is composed of

142

Benjamin Robinson

either One or Three (even both One and Three), just not Two? Ironically, the very protagonist who champions comparison over disjunction employs a disjunctive binary with regard to the Two – the situation recalls the paradox besetting political doctrines of  tolerance that express intolerance for intolerance. More than ironic, it is symptomatic that just such latent binary thinking about the Two secures its reputation as pariah. While we may well expect the One to tolerate no other God beside it, we are surely right to find it scandalous that the liberal Three cannot bear the presence of  the Two. As ecumenical as the Three otherwise is, in this decisive case it is not the Two who is the villain, but the Three itself  that promotes the all-or-nothing conf lict in which the Two is allowed no place lest it corrupt every place by its impulsiveness. Such abstract talk of numerals is, I know, rather comical since it seems to relate at best whimsically to considerations of more intuitive matters – to concepts, objects, and events in the world. As a step toward getting a better sense of what the taboo on the Two implies, I want to consider a brief  list of contrasts that ref lect enduring issues in what we might broadly call ‘the humanities’: mediation versus immediacy; immanence versus transcendence; motion versus stasis; and thought versus perception. The terms remain prohibitively general, but may nonetheless serve to bring us closer to grasping how the One and Three characterize some of our basic selfunderstandings as social beings. A quick glance already suggests that the first term of each pair is the more highly valued, at least in most humanities contexts. Mediation describes the productive engagement, via a mediating third, of  two conf licting forces or parties, whereas immediacy implies a simple, one-sided reaction. Immanence implies involvement, rather than the separation and hierarchy of  transcendence. Motion promises development in time; stasis, by contrast, is complete, nothing left to be done. Finally, thought designates a f luid medium, combining mediation and motion to take a thinker beyond the fixity of  the raw datum given by perception. To make matters a bit more concrete, we can take up these complementary terms in relation to a fundamental historical discourse. Especially suggestive is the discourse of  Christianity, since its complex Trinitarian doctrines revalue a basic contrast between Three and One – a One that had in an earlier era asserted itself over the plurality of polytheism. Consider,

Two or Three? – A Case for Two

143

for example, how the doctrine of immanence comes to be developed in contemporary theology through its contrast with the metaphysical transcendence of  Abrahamic monotheism. In the Epistle to the Philippians 2:67, Paul invokes a Christ ‘Who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage; rather, he made himself nothing by taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness.’ Gianni Vattimo cites this passage to argue that the Christian incarnation of  God determines a process of secularization, an immanence of  the divine in human af fairs, such that God loses ‘all the predicates of omnipotence, absoluteness, eternity and “transcendence” with respect to humanity.’1 For Vattimo, as well as other contemporary Catholic thinkers such as René Girard and Charles Taylor, the dialectic of  Trinitarian mediation is such that Christianity becomes, as Marcel Gauchet puts it, ‘the religion of  the exit from religion’.2 The tendency of such theological positions is clear: to associate mediation, immanence, motion, and thought with the positive pole of  Trinity, and immediacy, etc., with the negative pole of a superseded monism (or the metaphysics of presence). Of course, it is also the case that the respective values of  transcendence versus immanence, immediacy versus mediacy, or revelation versus thought (in short, of  One versus Three) are often reversed back to their ‘metaphysical’ valuation, where the One, as an immediate and authentic presence, is recovered after passing through a fallen state of mere discourse and simulation. The prodigal son returns from his exile just as Hegel’s absolute knowledge eventually sublates the errancy of  the dialectic. Indeed, as Karl Löwith argues, the narrative structure of salvation history in general is organized to resolve a tripartite temporal division between past, present and future into the timeless whole (the telos) that is redemption; to move

1 2

Gianni Vattimo, Belief, trans. Luca D’Isanto and David Webb (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 39. Vattimo and Girard both approve this paradoxical phrase of  Gauchet’s in the dialogue Christianity, Truth and Weakening Faith, ed. Pierpaolo Antonello (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 23.

144

Benjamin Robinson

history, as it were, from textual diachrony to iconic synchrony.3 If  Löwith is right – or if  Carl Schmitt is, who held that political concepts functioned as secularized theological concepts – then the ‘fallen’ modern era is still governed by a desire to return disparately discoursing individuals to the substantive unity of a sovereign people. It is fruitful to consider how slippery these reversals between One and Three are, since what the changing places ends up revealing is that the opposition itself  tends to be stable. In The Time that Remains Giorgio Agamben criticizes Löwith (and also Löwith’s eminent critic Hans Blumenberg) for misunderstanding the logic of salvation as it was set forth in antiquity. While Agamben thus mounts an irreligious defence of  the messianic element of  Christian antiquity, which might seem like advocating a return to the One, he does so by reinterpreting the divine One as an ambiguous Three, as a remainder exceeding, but part of, the division of world and eternity. The time of  the Messiah, for Agamben, refers to a quality of present time as it struggles to realize its own end. It issues from within chronological time, but enacts a time that will have encompassed all chronology. In an image borrowed from Walter Benjamin, messianic time is conceived as a division within the division between history and the end, it is ‘the time that is left us’ between those two segments.4 According to Agamben, Löwith and Blumenberg mistake such actively asserted messianic time for just the punctual end of  time itself, for the eschatological or apocalyptic time that marks ‘the parousia, the full presence of  the Messiah.’5 Agamben’s correction of  the misunderstanding does not articulate a logic distinct from that of  the One and the Three so much as transpose Löwith’s same humanist axiology (Three over One) back into Saint Paul’s militant rhetoric and thus back into a premodern epoch. Thus, Agamben turns Löwith’s ideology critique on its head: where Löwith exposes the modern cult of progress as but a persistent salvation narrative, Agamben uncovers Paul’s

Karl Löwith, Meaning in History (Chicago: University of  Chicago Press, 1949), 185. Giorgio Agamben, The Time that Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans, trans. Patricia Dailey (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), 68. 5 Agamben, The Time that Remains, 63. 3 4

Two or Three? – A Case for Two

145

salvation narrative as an achronological discourse of modernity. Walter Benjamin, Agamben aims to establish, was a reader of  Paul, but more importantly, Paul prefigures Benjamin’s quintessential modernism. The ef fect of  Agamben’s reading is to ensure that the messianic desire – the wish to displace and recover one’s own time from the clutches of a rote secular chronology – remains indif ferent to any epochalization in historical time. Contra Blumenberg, then, for Agamben modernity as an epoch has no special claim to legitimacy over antiquity. As Löwith comments, ‘if such unconditional faith seems to be fanciful to a modern mind, which prides itself on being “scientifically conditioned”, the modern mind fails to see that the Christian message was at all times extreme and incredible to the natural reason of  the well-balanced citizen.’6 I will come back to Agamben and Blumenberg, since I want to make the case that as much as they are concerned with the Two (and they are more attentive to it than most), they are always drawn away from the Two into uncovering new figures of mediation. For now, however, I want only to establish in broad strokes the tendency of even the most subtle work in the humanities to fall into a logic that pits the complexity of  the Three against the simplicity of  the One, while devoting little attention to the experiences – and problems – particular to the Two.

II.  The Two and the index Is the Two really as abandoned as all that in the humanities? I think I do not exaggerate when I assert that it is, but a specific formalization of  the Two in the work of  C.S. Peirce will help clarify the reasons for my claim. Peirce is known for grounding his semiotics on the distinction between three sign types: the symbol, the icon, and the index. Symbols are conventional signs, epitomized by verbal language. A word is a sign with no 6 Löwith, Meaning in History, 206.

146

Benjamin Robinson

inherent relationship to what it denotes, but rather an imputed one; it signifies by virtue of implicit social convention (or explicit law). Because symbolic reference depends on the regularity of a social field, the way such regularity governs its objects takes precedence over any independent determination of  the object. An icon, by contrast, signifies through immediate resemblance. It is the most self-suf ficient of signs since what it denotes can be analysed by analysing the sign itself. Whereas symbols rely on the factitious reproduction of  their regularity, an icon abides complete in its own meaning. In contrast to a symbolic proposition about an iconic referent, an icon itself is not falsifiable since it is virtual (‘strictly a possibility’7) and an af fect of  the imagination (‘a quality of  feeling’8). Hence, it is not constrained to imitate anything actually existing. A unicorn, for example, resembles a unicorn, whether or not there are unicorns. An indexical sign, finally, presumes neither the inherent likeness of  the icon, nor the social conventions of the symbol, but signifies through actual contiguity, ‘by being really and in its individual existence connected with the individual object.’9 Importantly for my argument, Peirce ties each of  these sign types to a numerical ‘mode of  being’. Thus, a symbol is associated with Thirdness; an icon with Firstness; and an index with Secondness. Thirdness, for Peirce, is quite clear: ‘Thirdness, in the sense of  the category, is the same as mediation.’10 Firstness, by contrast, is unmediated and pre-ref lexive. I quote Peirce’s characterization at length, because the features of  Firstness and Secondness are often confused, and yet, as spelling them out makes clear, they couldn’t be more dif ferent. Firstness is an instance of  that kind of consciousness which involves no analysis, comparison or any process whatsoever, nor consists in whole or in part of any act by which one stretch of consciousness is distinguished from another, which has its own positive

7 8 9 10

C.S. Peirce, ‘Sundry Logical Conceptions’, in The Essential Peirce, vol. 2, ed. Peirce Edition Project (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), 267–88 (277). Peirce, ‘The Categories Defended’, in Essential Peirce 2, 160–78, 160. Peirce, ‘Prolegomena to an Apology for Pragmaticism’, Collected Papers (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1933), 4.531. Peirce, ‘The Categories in Detail’, Collected Papers, 1.328.

Two or Three? – A Case for Two

147

quality which consists in nothing else, and which is of itself all that it is, however it may have been brought about; so that if  this feeling is present during a lapse of  time, it is wholly and equally present at every moment of  that time […]. A feeling, then, is not an event, a happening, a coming to pass, […] a feeling is a state, which is in its entirety in every moment of  time as long as it endures.11

This indivisible and wholly present state is what gives Firstness its aura of  ‘divine freedom’12 – such a state is the secular analogue to God’s own consciousness: for no event, no surprise, happens that is not already part of its perfected being. By contrast to this self-suf ficient composure, Secondness categorizes what we experience when something comes to pass just so, without our foreknowledge. Not surprisingly, then, Peirce considers Secondness to be the most worldly (and so the easiest to grasp) of  his categories – and perhaps for that reason it is also the least amenable to theoretical discourse in the humanities. Secondness is the element that the rough-and-tumble of  this world renders most prominent. We talk of  hard facts. That hardness, that compulsiveness of experience, is Secondness. A door is slightly ajar. You try to open it. Something prevents. You put your shoulder against it, and experience a sense of ef fort and a sense of resistance. These are not two forms of consciousness; they are two aspects of one two-sided consciousness. It is inconceivable that there should be any ef fort without resistance, or any resistance without a contrary ef fort. This double-sided consciousness is Secondness.13

As the signifier of such Secondness, an index is an existential marker, picking out an actual existent (rather than an ens rationis or ens imaginationis). For example, suppose I want a child to know about a car. I say to her, ‘a car is self-powered personal conveyance.’ Blank stare. But suppose now I want the child to know about a car not as a definition, but because a car is barrelling down on her right now. I scream, ‘watch out!’ My index (the exclamation) picks out an actuality composing our joint experience. Again, 11 12 13

Peirce, ‘The Categories in Detail’, Collected Papers: 1.306. Peirce, ‘A Guess at the Riddle’, in The Essential Peirce, vol. 1, ed. Nathan Houser and Christian Kloesel (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), 245–79, here 249. C.S. Peirce, ‘Sundry Logical Conceptions’, in The Essential Peirce 2, 268.

148

Benjamin Robinson

it is not a matter of symbolism, of  teaching her what the word ‘car’ means; she might even mistake in my cry what she is to watch out for as not the car, but simply the wheels of  the car.14 Regardless of what she understands, however, the Secondness at stake emerges from the reactions one would expect in each case. In the first, an earnest, abstracted look; in the second, sudden alarm expressed by a leap out of  the car’s path, an action/reaction, a double-sided awareness of an individual situation. This might seem too simple an example on which to base a call for consolidated attention to Secondness, but I think the example will prove to be rich enough to serve as the primal scene of my argument, a scene to which I will return at the conclusion of  the essay.15 For now, though, I just want to emphasize two things from Peirce’s account of  Secondness. First, contrary to the assumption that unmediated Secondness follows a logic of  tertium non datur (excluding the Three just as the Three excludes it), Secondness is not presented in the mode of a logical proposition or judgment. I do not make a judgment about the oncoming car when its approach suddenly comes to my attention. It does so simply as a singular, contingent fact, without any normative or necessary modality. That is, it asserts itself neither as a consequence of  the world, nor as a definition, nor as a case to be subsumed under a law. It is an experience that may disappear as suddenly as it arose … or be projected into other modes of signification.

14 15

See W. v. O. Quine’s famous example of  the indeterminate meaning of  ‘gavagai’, in Word and Object (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1960), 52. Wittgenstein and Chomsky are the best known critics of  knowing the world via ostension. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G.E.M. Anscombe (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1953) §28–38. Noam Chomsky, ‘Quine’s Empirical Assumptions’, in Words and Objections: Essays on the Work of  W.V. Quine, ed. Donald Davidson and Jaakko Hintikka (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1969), 53–68.

Two or Three? – A Case for Two

149

III.  Grounds for excluding the Two: The intelligible world Following Peirce’s distinction, I want my case for the Two’s unwarranted neglect to be understood as an argument for attending to a mode of  being I call indexicality, where indexicality is the way we attach symbolic and imaginary states to ef fects of an actual world. Before I make my case, however, I want to make more plausible my assertion that between One and Three – a distinction I will now gloss as one between Icon and Symbol or between Image and Text – attention to the indexical Two has been squeezed out as if our attachment to the actual world were a negligible facet of our being human. Indexes appear to mark experiences too promiscuous and indif ferent to merit sustained attention –tokens of mere existence devoid of meaning and proportion. Since the index signifies immediate presence (and nothing more), its very function of  tying us to the actual seems at odds with the enlarging power of our imagination, foregrounding the transient and the trivial: a little region and a brief instant, no arching heaven or abyssal hell. So what good is it? If  the instantaneous token of actuality is so evanescent – a sign as it were of insignificance – then it is hard to see why the index should merit any particular attention between the iconic image and the symbolic text. Accordingly, modern philosophy has not been generous to any index of actuality. Hume claimed, ‘existence is no news’, and, Kant declared, existence is not a real predicate, pointing out helpfully that whether you have 100 existing Thalers or 100 possible Thalers, they add up to the same amount. Kant concedes that you might not be rich with only conceptual Thalers, but what you lack is still Thalers not a special kind of  Thaler called an existing Thaler. His point is simply that if  the concept did not already contain every feature that applied to a thing, then ‘it would not be exactly the same thing that exists, but something more than we had thought in the concept.’16 In light of  Kant’s distinction between analytic and synthetic 16

Immanuel Kant, The Critique of  Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (London: Macmillan, 1929), 505 [B628].

150

Benjamin Robinson

knowledge, we might say that existence adds nothing to analysis – the relevant mode of something’s givenness to us is already assumed in its concept. What matters for Kant’s critical project is paring our categories down to exclude impossible experiences – which means that his quarry is the still capacious realm of possible experience, not a haphazard assortment of actual experiences. And it is only possible experience, not brute facticity, that can be intelligible in our conceptual and descriptive realms. While we surely could not survive in the world knowing only its intelligibility, unable to distinguish whether that something barrelling down on me is the concept of a car or an actual car, it seems that, where the ultimate existential stakes are the repleteness of our conceptual discourse and the freedom of our imagination, such an earthly objection would hardly shake our enlightened confidence.

IV.  Grounds for excluding the Two:     Philosophical anthropology and zoon logon echon If  the primary charge against Secondness holds that it short-changes the imaginative and conceptual richness that characterizes our essential humanity, it seems appropriate to consider some anthropological accounts of what that humanity consists of – and so to detail further the field of  Thirdness into which I am intervening. A traditional problem with indexical signification is not only that, as Kant and Hume maintain, existence adds nothing to what we already conceive or intuit, but that, given the essentially historical nature of  human being, it seems too limited to account for the scale of  history and world. Bishop Berkeley famously held that esse est percipere (to be is to perceive), and in the case of  the index, the sign refers only when its referent is near enough to be perceived simultaneously (as in the example above: when you point at a car, it must be in sight range for your gesture to work). Indexicality, therefore, would seem to give a mode of  being limited to sensory immediacy. So what about Lebenswelten like economies, states,

Two or Three? – A Case for Two

151

historical epochs, or dominant ideologies? Don’t they exist? If so, then the challenge would be to point to their presence in perceptual proximity – but where are they? Like scholastic nominalism, indexicality admits neither universals nor abstractions but has the character of what Duns Scotus calls haecceitas, or ‘thisness’, whose of fice is just to pick out actual instances. Such instances seem to be the sort of  face-to-face encounters that human communication, with its media networks and archives, has long ago rendered quaint. Indexicality, in short, would seem to describe a scale of  being more appropriate to animals than people. With the advent of recorded time and the growing ambit of  human territory and exchange, so ontologically crude a sign seemed fated to fall into the obscurity of an animalistic prehistory, a vanishing point before the acquisition of  language and transmission of culture, when pointing and grunting suf ficed to navigate what then counted for us as the world (a world essentially ‘poor in world’, as Heidegger characterized the animal realm).17 Since that hypothetical origin of our species-being, not only have we accumulated ever more concepts and images – whose dignity Kant hails as the essence of our rationality, morals, and taste – but these concepts and images are also both the substance and medium of what we communicate through space and pass down through time. Not so our primordial actuality, which does not belong to who we have become as an increasingly capacious and enduring species. This relation between our speciation in symbolic language (as zoon logon echon) and the animality of our indexical origins/ends is a central theme linking Agamben’s work, especially in Language and Death and The Open, to the philosophical anthropology of  thinkers like Arnold Gehlen, Helmuth Plessner and Hans Blumenberg. Language and Death begins with Hegel’s analysis of  the demonstrative pronoun ‘this’. Following Hegel, Agamben shows how the simple deictic marker is revealed through a dialectical turn to be a linguistic universal: whereas the content of  ‘this’ is

17

Martin Heidegger, Fundamental Concepts of  Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude, trans. William McNeill and Nicholas Walker (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 185.

152

Benjamin Robinson

an immediate particular, its universal form signifies an operation picking out ‘whatever it is that the current speaker of  this is gesturing toward.’ The empty signifiers ‘this’, ‘here’, and ‘now’ thus demonstrate not the sensual immediacy of a genuine index but the formal potential of  language to move us beyond the privacy of momentary meanings. The non-being of a f leeting ‘this’ is replaced by the social conventions of  language (ethos), which secure community beyond the crude indexical substance of actuality (death).18 In Agamben’s account deixis is the root phenomenon of  the symbolic order, though not as ‘taking a stand’ in the world (which, as we shall see, deixis is for Aristotle) but as ‘a fracture on the plane of  language between showing and saying, indication and signification.’19 When Aristotle discusses the sensuous hunch of some individual ‘this’ (τοδε τι), he accords the perception to the non-linguistic realm of nous (intellectual intuition). For Agamben however, the ‘this’ does not belong to nous, but to the class of  Jakobson’s linguistic ‘shifters’ and Benveniste’s ‘utterances’. These concepts direct our attention squarely to ‘the event of  language.’20 Agamben, it turns out, has appealed to deixis only to establish an ontology of  Thirdness, of mediation, beyond the individuality of any subject (mind/will). As the nihilism at the root of  language, deixis appears less actuality than empty signifier, less quantitative individuation, than a tragic quality of meaning. At the end of  Language and Death, Agamben juxtaposes thought, voice, and language. Translating Agamben’s closing schema into semiotic terms, we can say that thought occupies the position of  the indexical because it is the actual experience of thinking – and its actuality is f leeting; thought as thinking is tantamount to simple sentience, to animal consciousness, and its lived experience is one of dying away. Voice is the iconic identity of  life – it is the self-presence we would like to attribute to thought when we identify it as originating in our ownmost self, as our living potential in the face of dying matter. Language is the symbolic convention Giorgio Agamben, Language and Death: The Place of  Negativity, trans. Karen E. Pinkus and Michael Hardt (Minneapolis: University of  Minnesota Press, 1991), 79–81. 19 Agamben, Language and Death, 18. 20 Agamben, Language and Death, 25. 18

Two or Three? – A Case for Two

153

(the ethos or habit) that we have developed to take the place of  the idiotic privacy of  the voice. Agamben illuminates this threefold with the allegory of a walk in the woods. The animal sounds we hear in the woods are not our own voice; they fall outside the conventions of  human language: ‘This f light of invisible animals is thought.’21 The indexical actual becomes an animal that language tries to grasp hold of and recover for the human species. But an animal rustling is never finally our own voice, but remains an atavistic ‘outside’ within our human species being. As it crystallizes in the poetical epilogue, the telos of  Agamben’s inquiry is the third term language that, as historicity and sociality, mediates between animality and the human voice. Those two extremes are not – just as their mode of mere existence has the character of  being non-essential, so too does the animal exist for language as f leetingness, as non-Being. Agamben inserts language in the place of  that non-Being, allowing us, the zoon logon echon (‘the animal possessing language’), to distinguish between animal existence and human voice up until the moment when our history/our language returns us to our despeciation, to our ultimate lack of essential Being. In The Open, published twenty years later, it is just this theriomorphic threshold that characterizes the messianic community whose glimmer Agamben detects dispersed throughout our human time, indif ferent to our merely historical epochs. Where Agamben’s texts draw their utopian energy from what is to come, namely, from an eventual undoing of  the distinctions that give us the architecture of our alienation, Blumenberg’s work steadfastly focuses on what he calls, alluding to Heidegger’s riposte to Ernst Cassirer’s teleological optimism, the terminus a quo (the starting point).22 Blumenberg begins his Work on Myth with the decisive enlargement of our horizon that occurs when human history emerges across the threshold of prehistoric animality. Human activity, unlike that of animals, cannot fulfil its 21 Agamben. Language and Death, 108. 22 Hans Blumenberg, Arbeit am Mythos (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1986), 26. For a discussion of  Blumenberg’s af finity to Heidegger’s position in the debate with Cassirer, see David Adams, ‘Metaphors for Mankind: The Development of  Hans Blumenberg’s Anthropological Metaphorology’, in Journal of  the History of  Ideas 52/1 (1991), 152–66.

154

Benjamin Robinson

uniquely extended possibilities for action. The vacant potentials on the properly human horizon are directly responsible for our foundational anxiety. This paranoia is the existential experience of  ‘the absolutism of reality.’23 It is precisely as non-animals, then, speciated by the insuf ficiency of our instincts for controlling our environment, that we are cast upon the words and images of myth. ‘The absolutism of images and desires’ is the unavoidable correlate of  ‘the absolutism of reality’.24 The inescapability of such mythic recourse is ref lected in the prolific variations on the Prometheus myth concerning human self-assertion in the face of absence.25 Prometheus compensates the gods’ failure to equip humanity with the natural instincts they gave the animals by granting it symbolic means to survive.26 Discourse is our fate as humans because it is just as non-animals, in excess of any instinctual endowment, that we need myth to compensate for our sensorium’s inadequacy to its environment. Where for Luther the deus absconditus, invisible to the human senses, assigns revelation to the realm of  the miraculous, for Blumenberg it is man himself who withdraws from his sensory insuf ficiency: this is the anthropological fate that Plessner called, in secular analogy to Luther, homo absconditus.27 Hidden from his own nature, man is revealed in his symbols. What Agamben and Blumenberg share is a sense that in the interval between the genetic origin (terminus a quo) and the teleological end (terminus ad quem) of  humanity we find ourselves always on this side of  the invisible threshold where our nightmare of absolute reality is sublimated by a discourse of absolute metaphor. Firstness and Thirdness, they discover, is just what we have left of  Secondness – they are the living remnants, as

23 Blumenberg, Arbeit am Mythos, 12. 24 Blumenberg, Arbeit am Mythos, 14. See Robert Wallace, ‘Introduction to Blumenberg’, New German Critique 32 (1984), 93–108, (95). 25 This is also the theme of  Bernard Stiegler’s Technics and Time: The Fault of  Epimetheus (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), esp. 196–200. 26 See the discussions of  Prometheus in Blumenberg, Arbeit am Mythos, especially 359–81. 27 Helmuth Plessner, ‘Homo absconditus’, in Gesammelte Schriften 8 (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1983), 353–66.

Two or Three? – A Case for Two

155

it were, of our indexical finitude. We never have our animal beginnings or endings except as re-entered into our human language as myths. Inserting such obscure animal signs into human time, Agamben and Blumenberg are not drawn to history but to the inessential status of  the species: as Blumenberg’s fabulators or Agamben’s virtual theriomorphs. What we do not have are the epochs – the modernities, antiquities, postmodernities – for whose demarcation we would need another kind of index, one that pointed not so much to ourselves in our shape-shifting potential, but to our environment in its actuality. To be sure, the Fundamentalanthropologie of Agamben and Blumenberg does draw attention to the charged status of indexicality as a limit/other to the human; and this liminal status lends the indexical a desirable moral cache. The problem is that there is an incompatibility between attending to indexicality as a pragmatic category of  human experience, on the one hand, and casting the index in a tragic-heroic role as the victim of an ineluctable (‘absolute’) myth – the myth in which the actual is sacrificed in a history that has turned into our virtual world. Antonio Negri has said about Agamben’s analysis of our ‘state of exception’ that in it ‘the world today seems to have been fixed onto a totalitarian and static horizon’ at the same time as it is traversed by a ‘feverish utopian anxiety’.28 The ‘totalitarian and static horizon’ is cast in the image of  the sacrificed index (read: the sacrificed actuality) of  human life. In other words, the totality gathered up in the myth of  humanity is a kind of iconic state – with the Peircean implication of a timeless, partless whole. For Peirce, as for Agamben, this Firstness is sovereign – it neither circulates nor connects outside of itself – and as such it has suspended Thirdness (suspended the law, proportion, and dialectics). It has done so in the name of an imaginary Secondness, a f leeting actual that serves as a miracle or revelation, but one tragically fixed as an icon, as a nunc stans, both inside and outside of  historical time. Whether or not we then utopically ‘suspend the suspension’, Secondness remains in either case in the category of  the virtual: a myth of origins or

28

Antonio Negri, ‘The Ripe Fruit of  Redemption’, Il Manifesto, 26 July 2003. Accessed 7 September 2011 at: .

156

Benjamin Robinson

ends. The indexical, in other words, is relinquished as Peirce’s quotidian category in order to serve instead as a sublime foil for our unredeemed state.

V.  Hans Robert Jauss on the intelligibility of  thresholds By analysing the roles that Thirdness and Secondness play in Agamben and Blumenberg’s work, I have sought to characterize some dominant traits of  the humanistic field into which I hope a more emphatic awareness of  the Two may intervene. As a final step, before returning to the ‘primal scene’ of indexicality that I sketched above, I want to describe an intervention quite opposed to my own – Hans Robert Jauss’s critique of  Blumenberg and Walter Benjamin (whose thinking here shows kinship to Agamben’s). For Jauss the problem in these thinkers is not that indexicality gets lost in a play of image and text, but that their turn away from indexicality to the discursive Third is not emphatic enough. They get too caught up in the image for Jauss’s progressive moral sensibility, abandoning the sort of deliberative mediation of past and present that Jauss argues is the defining trait of aesthetic experience. Indeed, as clear as I want to be that Agamben and Blumenberg fail to develop a category of  Secondness, I also want to recognize that a concept of indexicality remains operative in, even central to their thought. My point is not that they are disguised mystics ( Jauss’s ultimate charge against Blumenberg and Benjamin), but that, although they deeply problematize both Firstness and Thirdness, they do not recognize the Secondness in their thinking for what it is. Ironically, it is just this undeveloped indexical remainder in Benjamin and Blumbenberg – sublimated into either a dialectical image or an absolute metaphor – that irritates Jauss so greatly. A careful reader, Jauss zeroes in on the common problem that derives from their negative anthropology: Is the human they trace, thrown into a world that exceeds its natural endowment, lost to any agency commensurate to its being?

Two or Three? – A Case for Two

157

Jauss’s argument is that, when it comes to the all important question of  the thresholds that demarcate the stages of  historical development, Blumenberg and Benjamin both hold a conception of  ‘epoch’ with a decidedly reactionary character; their epoch represents ‘a return to the old, ante Christum natum concept’ that means ‘the point at which something comes to rest or a reversal takes place’, rather than ‘a beginning event which irrevocably changes things’.29 Jauss’s objection takes two forms that together link the idea of epoch to that of agency. First, he objects to the way that for Blumenberg epochal change simply befalls us as an accident. Thus, in Blumenberg’s words: ‘there are no witnesses to the radical disruption of epochs. The transitional phase between epochs is an imperceptible boundary that is not clearly connected to any particular date or event.’30 Second, he recognizes that at the level of  human experience, such accidental epochalization means that we have no deliberative agency when it comes to the course of  history. This lack of agency is especially clear to him in the way Benjamin severs the insight an artwork gives us into a past epoch from any capacity for forward-looking agency. ‘Benjamin short-circuited the paradigm of an aesthetics of reception with that of  theology’,31 because for Benjamin only the dead can hope to be redeemed in the dialectical image, ‘in which the past suddenly unites with the present moment to become a constellation.’32 Jauss argues that Benjamin posits a void in which an instantaneous sense of recognition (‘das Jetzt der Erkennbarkeit’33) takes the place of symbolic work. An experientially inaccessible, theological causality, based on the simultaneous alignment of all being in God’s suprahistorical eyes, takes the place of an intentional, prudential stance toward the future. The simultaneity of  being that f lares up in the dialectical image is non-discursive and non-predicative. 29 Hans Robert Jauss, ‘Tradition, Innovation, and Aesthetic Experience’, The Journal of  Aesthetics and Art Criticism 46/3 (Spring 1988), 375–88, here 387, 379. 30 Jauss, 378; Blumenberg, Legitimacy, 469. 31 Jauss, ‘Tradition’, 386. 32 Jauss, ‘Tradition’, 385. 33 Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften 5 (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1972–89), 608 [N 18, 4].

158

Benjamin Robinson

The stakes of  Jauss’s criticism are high. Is historicity on an epochal scale cognitively accessible to those who bear epochal change or is it simply suf fered as accomplished fact (Blumenberg) or seized as an obscure gift (Benjamin)? ‘When all the historian (or any agent) can do is kindle the sparks of  hope in the past, not in the future, what can waiting achieve?’34 For Jauss it is precisely the achievement of aesthetic experience, misunderstood by Blumenberg and Benjamin as an ultimately passive receptivity, to communicate the past by presenting it anew. Aesthetic innovation works to make the past relevant to the present. The very idea of  tradition implies for Jauss a conscious activity of preferment, an aesthetic experience that makes out of past traces an active selection comprising the meaning of  the present. The gap between the horizon of experience and the horizon of expectation is, in Jauss’s view, not a severing, but the occasion for building a hermeneutic bridge so that we may symbolically adjudicate our preference for new over old (or vice versa). Jauss proposes that we recognize aesthetic experience as precisely the sort of consciousness that allows us to test visions of  the future: ‘The indispensable role of aesthetic experience has always been, and should continue to be, creating expectations – creating them in order to reveal and test what is thinkable or desirable.’35 Adopting the deliberative equipoise of  the political moderate, Jauss comments: ‘Prophets on the right, prophets on the left – who will blame the child of  the world who, finding himself in the middle, mistrusts the pausing of  truth as well as the stopping of  history and instead sets his hope in the quiet power of what are, if no longer absolute, then perhaps modest beginnings.’36

34 Jauss, ‘Tradition’, 386. 35 Jauss, ‘Tradition’, 386–7. 36 Jauss, ‘Tradition’, 387.

Two or Three? – A Case for Two

159

VI.  The primal scene revisited:     Interpellation versus re-speciation I have taken us through Jauss’s critique of  Blumenberg and Benjamin to demonstrate how insistent the opposition of  Firstness and Thirdness is; how completely an anxiety like Jauss’s concerning the intelligibility of  tradition desensitizes him to the disruptive force of  the actual – to ‘the f light of invisible animals’, to cite Agamben again. A response to Jauss begins with a simple observation. Jauss’s case for the mediation of old and new via the communication of aesthetic experience needs the foil of immediacy. Immediacy marks one thing for Jauss: the failure of  tradition to transmit. But immediacy is not one thing – it can be the transcendental immediacy of  the One, outside of  history, bracketing our species-being mythically between a quo and ad quem; or it can be the immediacy of  the Two, an encounter that is simply not a matter of  thought. Both the One and the Two are immediate in the sense that neither is characterized by relatedness or Thirdness. Yet whereas Firstness portends the ontotheology of revelation, Secondness announces immediacy as simultaneously event and agent. The index marks the action/reaction couplet that embroils me when anything unexpected happens – a broken sense of actuality as actus purus (pure actuality) and actio pura (pure activity) opens up as a singular occasion.37 Or, let me put it this way, the index marks the moment where automatic response and intentional choice fall together. It marks the point where we attend to the fact that we are given even as we are free, or that we have a symbolic order even as we can oppose it to the imagination.

37

Blumenberg attributes a rupture in the cosmic view of  the world to a Scholastic misunderstanding of  the Aristotelian actus purus (pure actuality) as actio pura (pure activity), i.e. to the modern sense that truth and reconciliation are available only through constant activity and making. See Blumenberg, Paradigms for a Metaphorology, trans. Robert Ian Savage (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010), 23.

160

Benjamin Robinson

Jauss complains that Benjamin ‘cannot decide whether to use active or passive images to explicate “the present moment of recognisability”’.38 But, to evoke here my primal scene of indexicality, what is so striking about any last second leap out of  the path of a careering car is just how promptly it occurs at the juncture of  kenosis and presence of mind, behaviourism and discretion. Jauss holds that Benjamin’s dialectical image and Blumenberg’s absolute metaphor valorize a ‘pausing of  truth’ and a ‘stopping of  history’ against which Jauss sets ‘the quiet power of … modest beginnings’. Yet stopping and starting are relational terms – what we actually encounter is a singular change in momentum. This intervening actuality is just the event horizon of an index: it sets of f an interval of aion (inchoative time) f lashing up as an instant of  kairos (individual time), a moment of  ‘letting be’ generating the unheard-of chance for ‘becoming anew’. For Aristotle, our arts and sciences are grounded by an intuitive perception in which one thing inexplicably emerges out of what had been an undif ferentiated state, to ‘make a stand’.39 Whether we pick out this singularity or it picks us out is ambiguous, as is the question whether we initiate the stand or find it already in force. The Greek verb for standing (ιστημι) can mean both ‘to transpire’ and ‘to stand still’; indeed, the verb shares a root with stasis, which in Greek denotes either a state of rest or a revolt.40 Aristotle writes: ‘When one of a number of  logically indiscriminable particulars has made a stand, the earliest universal is present in the soul’.41 Instead of  the sublime speciation of  the human as such to which Blumenberg and Agamben’s speculative anthropology is drawn, what we find in Aristotle is a new species precipitating out of a haphazard encounter with a singularity that stands out adventitiously (and not innately or 38 Jauss, ‘Tradition’, 386. 39 Aristotle, Posterior Analytics II.19 (100a15–16). 40 Plato’s distinction in The Republic (V 470) between polemos (war) and stasis (rebellion) has become a locus classicus in political philosophy. Gregory of  Nazianzus’s discussion of stasis in the Trinity forms the starting point of what Carl Schmitt calls ‘theologico-political stasiology’. Political Theology II, trans. Michael Hoelzl and Graham Ward (London: Polity, 2008) 122–4. 41 Aristotle, Posterior Analytics II.19 (100a15–16).

Two or Three? – A Case for Two

161

intentionally) among rationally indiscriminable particulars. For Aristotle, the threshold of  the new asserts itself willy-nilly in an intuition and so forces itself upon us as a matter of our concern. Why do we even bother looking for predicates for characterizing something so existentially contestable as a Lebenswelt? The answer lies in the way in which an accidental encounter will no longer have been accidental just when it has proved itself  to matter; that is, when it has been freed to be projected into our shared activity (like, for example, love). Insofar as ‘the human’ just happens to be zoon logon echon, i.e. accidentally happens to have an essence, the indexical experience does not lie at our anthropological extremes, but shoots through our ordinary life. An indexical act is the occasion for starting or ending each discourse that asserts a claim to truth. Each such discourse is generated by a subject at the same time as the subject is occasioned by attending to the index. The implications of such reciprocal agency are far reaching because such agency rules out phenomenological ‘aboutness’ or the ‘intentional act’ as the transcendental origin of conscious awareness. Our discourses do not begin in an intention but in an indication.42 As Peirce notes about the indicative mode of  being, it ‘is the experience of ef fort, prescinded from the idea of a purpose … Ef fort only is ef fort by virtue of its being opposed; and no third element enters.’43 As much as such purposeless responsiveness disturbs Jauss (and those who insist on the primacy of  the symbolic Third), finding the actual occasion for thought in non-thought (that is, in the non-deliberative real ) provides, for all the moral anxiety it awakens, the only true opportunity for immanently re-speciating the species. Re-speciation of  the species sounds grandiose, but the thought is not so mind-boggling. If as a species we admit only an accidental essence, then as a matter of discovering (and not inventing) who we are in the world, we are always susceptible to determining our essence dif ferently anew. Such 42 Derrida argues that for Husserl ‘indication must be set aside, abstracted, and “reduced” as an extrinsic and empirical phenomenon’. See Jacques Derrida, Speech and Phenomena, trans. David B. Allison (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 27. 43 Peirce, ‘A Letter to Lady Welby (1904)’, Collected Papers, 8: 328.

162

Benjamin Robinson

a re-speciation does not occur apocalyptically as an actualization of, say, Brueghel’s beak-headed and moth-winged humanoids, but in the sense that, should we be called to act upon a changed state of af fairs, our agency as humans at once takes new bearings. One might object that such changes do not involve familiar objects changing their character, such as ravens turning white or water turning to wine – in other words, one might object that what I am calling re-speciation amounts only to the constrained epigenesis of a largely stable human world. It may be the case that our inventory of entities by and large remains the same; nonetheless, what does change matters – namely, our agency itself, which in turn redounds on the way ‘the world’ is individuated for us as a field of interaction. It is thus not the appearance of a monster in the world, the miracle of a white raven – that is, it is not this or that betrayal of  the reliability of empirical induction – but the sudden indication of a new systematicity that is at stake. Whether we choose to dub that novum an ‘epoch’ or a ‘dispensation’ or an ‘agency’, what has changed decisively is our environment, not necessarily something or another in it. What else do we mean by conceptualizing our history in terms of epochs except that we happen each time to become new as a species? As we have seen, Jauss believes that Benjamin stages a meeting between past and future as an interruption, as an aleatory encounter in which there is nothing to be deliberated, only a personal address to be suddenly heeded. So what kind of subject is it that would here be called into existence not by a conscious act of preferment, a deliberative orientation, but simply at the beck and call of an unforeseen deictic act? I want to return here to my primal scene by way of  that famous scene of  Althusser’s whereby a subject is called into existence by the shout, ‘hey, you there’, of a policeman.44 In Althusser’s staging, the anxiety that Jauss expresses takes on especially concentrated political form – the subject turns out to be a helplessly ideological subject: ‘individuals are always-already interpellated by ideology as

44 Louis Althusser, ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’, in Lenin and Philosophy, and Other Essays, trans. by Ben Brewster (London: New Left Books, 1971), 127–88, here 174.

Two or Three? – A Case for Two

163

subjects … individuals are always-already subjects.’45 For Althusser, this is such a dire result because it always only gives us an individual fully constrained by the pre-existing world, a world, moreover, that is saturated by religious myth and capitalist exploitation.46 Yet we could just as easily recognize in the indexical hailing – whether our example is the (ideologically pre-loaded) shout of a policeman or the harder-to-place screech of a car or f light of invisible animals – simply an occasion whereby we perceive that our ideology is one; that is, we see our Lebenswelt itself as an Aristotelian ‘τοδε τι’, as an individual. To put this re-speciation in terms of  the philosophical anthropology I have been discussing, to say that we are ‘always-already subjects’ is just to say that we are a species, that we are a certain kind of agent. The index itself, however, is not a Third, is not a communicable meaning, but simply the occasion by which our speciation suddenly appears as inessential, contingent: it appears as one, not another – it stands out in its plain actuality. Indeed, we are hailed by it, but the mode of its appeal is not discursive, but ‘prescinded of purpose’ (Peirce); it lays out no preconditions (in the Kantian mode of possible worlds), but indicates an occasion for a distinct individuation of  the species – which means nothing else but that it presents a chance for another agency, for inaugurating another epoch, for indicating this very world as such: just actually, not necessarily. And that, fellow friends of  the Three, is the not negligible achievement of  the Two.

45 Ibid., 176. 46 I elaborate elsewhere how Althusser mistakes the index as a concept rather than a name, see ‘Was leistet ein Index?’, in Stefan Börnchen, Georg Mein, and Martin Roussel, eds, Name, Ding. Referenzen (Paderborn: Fink, 2012), 303–19.

Part III

History of  Science

Christian J. Emden

Uncertain Things, Visually Enhanced: On the Production of  Epistemic Images

Much recent work in the history and philosophy of science has focused on the epistemic status of visual evidence, on the tense relationship between images and statistical analysis, and on the visual production of objectivity. Lorraine Daston’s and Peter Galison’s studies in this area, for instance, have clearly shown the importance of  the scientific image for the stabilization of what is widely regarded as ‘normal science’.1 The training of  the scientist’s eye, together with the technical creation of reified images, plays as crucial a role for the production of  facts as the experimental practices themselves. Likewise, Galison’s studies on the history of microphysics have drawn much attention to the way in which even scientific practice that heavily relies on statistical methods cannot avoid recourse to the production of images.2 At the same time, and Galison’s history of microphysics is instructive here, it seems short-sighted to detach the production of images in the sciences from the materiality of  their experimental settings. The production of images, on this account, is as much involved in the representation of as in an intervention in the material world.3 Most public scientific images, to be sure, are 1 2 3

See Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, Objectivity (New York: Zone, 2007). See Peter Galison, Image and Logic: A Material Culture of  Microphysics (Chicago: University of  Chicago Press, 1997). My use of  the term intervention is, of course, indebted to Ian Hacking, Representing and Intervening: Introductory Topics in the Philosophy of Natural Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 262–74. Hacking’s initial claim that experiments ‘create’ phenomena has occasionally been misunderstood as advocating the social construction of scientific facts. See, however, the clarifying remarks on constructivism in science studies in Ian Hacking, The Social Construction of  What? (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 62–99.

168

Christian J. Emden

standardized representations: they appear in textbooks and on magazine covers, in academic articles and on laboratory web pages. In contrast to such standardized images, ‘epistemic images’, as I shall term them, are not yet detached from the novel and uncertain entities that they represent. Epistemic images, in other words, can be understood as the site where representation and material world interact: they are certainly images of something, but at the same time they materially shape what they represent. In a first step, I shall outline the production of epistemic images along the lines of  three historical examples: Antonie van Leeuwenhoek’s ‘acquatick insects’, Abraham Trembley’s freshwater hydra, and Christian Gottfried Ehrenberg’s infusoria. For Ehrenberg in particular, the dif ference between image and specimen increasingly breaks down, highlighting the materiality of  the image as much as the image’s intervention in what we might regard as the world ‘out there’. Secondly, I shall argue that the advent of  technical images in the course of  the nineteenth century, especially photography, does not dramatically alter this situation but rather tends to exacerbate the ambiguous nature of epistemic images. In a final step it will be necessary to draw some wider conclusions from this discussion: although much current work in the history and philosophy of science has moved on from the constructivist debates of  the 1980s and 1990s, such work is still occasionally marked by a commitment to a radical representationalism that undercuts the material dimension of  those images that are produced by scientific practice. Hans-Jörg Rheinberger’s prominent study on ‘epistemic things’ in twentieth-century molecular biology serves as a prominent example here: ‘epistemic things’ are, above all, of a representational kind.4 In contrast, I shall defend the view, grounded in a cautious appeal to philosophical naturalism, that epistemic images, as much as the practices of scientific activity themselves, remain more firmly embedded

4

See Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, Toward a History of  Epistemic Things: Synthesizing Proteins in the Test Tube (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997). More recently, however, Rheinberger has shifted his focus on the materiality of  the biological sciences. See his Epistemologie des Konkreten: Studien zur Geschichte der modernen Biologie (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 2006).

Uncertain Things, Visually Enhanced

169

in the material world than often assumed.5 At best, representationalism can serve as a regulative fiction.

I.  Unruly images of uncertain things Is the freshwater hydra, or polyp, that strangest creature of eighteenthcentury natural history, an animal or a plant? Was it able to regenerate itself after parts of it had been cut of f  by the experimenter?6 Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, who had examined green weeds in a sluice outside the Dutch city of  Delft, and had communicated his observations to the Royal Society on Christmas day 1702, called this newly discovered entity ‘Animalculum,’ but he also remained uncertain as to its exact nature.7 On the other hand, Abraham Trembley – most famous for discovering the ability of  these organisms to regenerate themselves (and thus starting a complex philosophical debate about the very nature of  life and living forces) – clearly saw them as ‘aquatick Insects’.8 Leaving aside the philo-

5 6

7 8

Although I shall not discuss this in any detail, a fruitful discussion of such a naturalist position can be found in Joseph Rouse, How Scientific Practices Matter: Reclaiming Philosophical Naturalism (Chicago: University of  Chicago Press, 2002). See Abraham Trembley, Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire d’un genre de polypes d’eau douce, à bras en forme des cornes (Leyden: Jean & Herman Verbeek, 1744), 149–228. For a concise account of the scientific and philosophical problems raised by Trembley’s observations, see Thomas L. Hankins, Science and the Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 130–40. ‘Part of a Letter from Mr Antony van Leeuwenhoek, F.R.S. Concerning Green Weeds Growing in Water, and Some Animalcula Found about Them’, Philosophical Transactions of  the Royal Society of  London 23 (1702/03), 1304–11: 1307. ‘Observations and Experiments upon the Freshwater Polypus, by Monsieur Trembley, at the Hague’, Philosophical Transactions of  the Royal Society of  London 42 (1742/43), iii–xi: iii. See also ‘Translation of a Letter from Mr. Abraham Trembley, F. R. S. to the President, with Observations upon Several Newly Discover’d Species of  Fresh-Water Polypi’, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London 43 (1744/45), 169–83,

170

Christian J. Emden

sophical issue of self-generation, which stood in sharp contrast to traditional theories of divine preformation, the freshwater hydra was a curious entity. Henry Baker’s account of  that ‘wonderful little Creature’,9 referring back to the work of  Leeuwenhoek and Trembley, opened with a testimony to the strangeness of  the visual evidence at hand: The Accounts […] we have been favoured with from Abroad, concerning the little Creature called a Polype, have appeared so extraordinary, so contrary to the common Course of  Nature and our received Opinions of  Animal-Life; that many People have look’d upon them as ridiculous Whims and absurd Impossibilities. In order, therefore, to set this Matter right, I beg you’ll give Leave to lay before the Publick […] some Observations and Experiments on this Creature […].10

In the first half of  the eighteenth century, then, it was a particularly small and inconspicuous living thing that fundamentally questioned what counted as ‘Animal-Life’. Countering the image of  the freshwater hydra as such a bizarre organism, Baker, of course, had to find an approach to the visual evidence that could persuade a wider public while remaining scientifically accurate. The only solution to the uncertain status of  the visual evidence – produced by the microscope, then drawn by hand, and finally printed in the pages of  the Philosophical Transactions of  the Royal Society and elsewhere – was to focus on a verbal description of what was out there. Visual evidence, in other words, was not suf ficient and, by its very nature, was bewildering and confusing. In a certain sense, the discovery of  the freshwater hydra highlighted the limitations of visual evidence, and both Baker and Trembley spent much time and space writing about the forms and movements of  these organisms, comparing them also to other known

9 10

and ‘Observations upon Several Species of  Small Water Insects of  the Polypus Kind, Communicated in a Letter to the President, from Mr. Abraham Trembley F. R. S.’, Philosophical Transactions of  the Royal Society of  London 44 (1746/47), 627–55. Henry Baker, An Attempt Towards a Natural History of  the Polype: In a Letter to Martin Folkes, Esq.; President of  the Royal Society (London: R. Dodsley, 1743), 11. Ibid., 3–4.

Uncertain Things, Visually Enhanced

171

‘polypes’.11 But both also emphasized to an astonished public of educated gentlemen that, as Baker put it, their written account was a ‘Testimony of  the Truth’ and that, as Trembley noted, their visual observations had paid ‘great attention even to the smallest of circumstances [grande attention, même aux plus petites circonstances]’ which could have inf luenced the experiments with the freshwater hydra.12 In order to be admitted to the realm of scientific fact, strange animals required ‘the most evident kinds of proofs [les preuves les plus évidentes]’, whereas the love of  the marvellous that was often to be found among naturalists inevitably was bound to produce the greatest kinds of errors.13 Beware of visual evidence. This cautious appeal to scientific certainty over mere curiosity also comes to the fore in the exquisite drawings which Baker had inserted into the text of  his detailed account, and which Trembley reproduced with even greater artistic detail on a number of plates after each chapter of  his Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire d’un genre de polypes d’eau douce (1744). Nevertheless, the nature of  the freshwater hydra remained, at least in principle, contested. Indeed, Trembley’s discussion of  the self-generating abilities of  the freshwater hydra started out with the heuristically posed question of whether the freshwater hydra was a plant or an animal.14 The case might have been settled by then with regard to the freshwater hydra, but the animalcules observed in standing water, sluices, puddles, attached to weed f loating in a harbour, or simply in a glass of water, continued to present much visual confusion deep into the nineteenth century. Already Leeuwenhoek’s observations during the early 1700s, carried out in the ditches, canals, and ponds around Delft, can be read as a history of wonder and uncertainty. Looking at his collected samples through the microscope, he continued to be ‘supriz’d with the sight of a great many and dif ferent kinds of  Animalcula,’ and the drawings accompanying his regular letters to See ibid., 11–24, and Trembley, Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire d’un genre de polypes d’eau douce, 1–78. 12 Baker, An Attempt Towards a Natural History of  the Polype, 6, and Trembley, Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire d’un genre de polypes d’eau douce, iv. 13 Trembley, Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire d’un genre de polypes d’eau douce, 23–4. 14 Ibid., 149–50. 11

172

Christian J. Emden

the Royal Society back in London are an archive of what must have seemed to many of  his contemporaries absurd organisms.15 But surprise itself can only be counterbalanced by comparing the animalcules to objects of similar size, like a ‘corn of sand’, although such comparisons themselves are always misleading and rarely clarify what is seen.16 Leeuwenhoek himself complained not only about the fact that his animalcules were continuously moving before his eyes and that he was barely even able to see their existence, for instance, in the semen of  fish, but he also remained unsure as to whether some of  these animalcules had wheels and, if so, how many.17 But the crucial experiment in the history of what was about to be called ‘infusoria’ came in October 1702: In Octob. 1702. I caused the Filth or Dirt of  the Gutters (when there was no Water there, and the Dirt was quite dry) to be gathered together, and took about a Teacupful of  the same, and put it into a Paper upon my Desk; since which time I have often taken a little thereof and pour’d upon it boyl’d Water after it had stood still it was cold, to the end that I might obviate any objection that should be made, as of  there were living Creatures in that Water. […] After that the abovemention’d Dry substance had lain near 21 months in the Paper, I put into a Glass Tube of an inch Diameter the remainder of what I had by me, and pour’d upon it boyl’d Rain Water, after it was almost cold, and then immediately view’d the smallest parts of it, particularly that which subsided leisurely to the bottom, and observ’d a great many round Particles, most of which were reddish, and they were cerntainly Animalcula;

15

16 17

‘Part of a Letter from Mr Antony van Leeuwenhoek, F. R. S. concerning Green Weeds Growing in Water, and Some Animalcula Found about Them’, 1305. For another example, see ‘Part of a Letter from Mr Antony van Leeuwenhoek, concerning the Worms in Sheeps Livers, Gnats, and Animalcula in the Excrements of  Frogs’, Philosophical Transactions of  the Royal Society of  London 22 (1700/1), 509–18: 11–12. ‘Part of a Letter from Mr Antony van Leeuwenhoek, concerning the Worms in Sheeps Livers, Gnats, and Animalcula in the Excrements of  Frogs’, 511. See ‘Part of a Letter from Mr Anthony van Leeuwenhoek, F. R. S. to the Pablisher, concerning Several Microscopical Observations’, Philosophical Transactions of  the Royal Society of  London 22 (1700/1), 903–7: 7, and ‘A Letter to the Royal Society, from Mr Anthony Van Leeuwenhock, F. R. S. concerning Animalcula on the Roots of  Duck-Weed, etc.’, Philosophical Transactions of  the Royal Society of  London 24 (1704/5), 1784–93: 1784–5 and 1788.

Uncertain Things, Visually Enhanced

173

and some hours after I discover’d a few that had open’d or unfolded their Bodies, swimming thro’ the Water, […].18

The experiment was so perplexing that Leeuwenhoek had more dirt collected from the gutter and dried for several months: ‘A few days ago I took some of  this same dry stuf f and infus’d it both in cold Water that had been boyl’d, and in Rain Water newly fallen; whereupon the Animalcula began to show themselves, and that in great numbers.’19 Even labelling these small organisms for the first time as ‘infusoria’ in 1763 – simply because they were often to be found in infusions of organic substances that had decomposed in air – did not provide better guidance to the eye and the boundaries between such protozoa and spermatozoa were often rather f luid.20 Only a much broader and, in a sense, almost encyclopaedic ef fort that sought to collect and categorize such organisms (and that already began to take shape in the latter decades of the eighteenth century), would be able to turn the fragmented microscopic observations into something akin to stable knowledge.21 Experiments in a glass jar, or with dried dirt, did not accurately ref lect the actual diversity of  these infusoria, and standard accounts of  the subject accumulated, listed, and described

18

‘A Letter to the Royal Society, from Mr Anthony Van Leeuwenhock, F. R. S. concerning Animalcula on the Roots of  Duck-Weed, etc.’, 1790. 19 Ibid., 1791–2. 20 See Martin Frobenius Ledermüller, Mikroskopische Gemüths- und Augen-Ergötzung, bestehend in Ein Hundert nach der Natur gezeichneten und mit Farben erleuchteten Kupfertafeln, Sammt deren Erklärung (Nuremberg: Adam Wolfgang Winterschmidt, 1763), 88, and Wilhelm Friedrich von Gleichen-Russwurm, Abhandlung über die Saamen- und Infusionsthierchen, und über die Erzeugung: nebst mikroskopischen Beobachtungen des Saamens der Thiere, und verschiedener Infusionen, mit illuminirten Kupfertafeln (Nuremberg: Adam Wolfgang Winterschmidt, 1778). 21 See, for instance, Otto Frederik Müller’s Vermium terrestrium et f luviatilium, seu animalium infusoriorum, helminthicorum et testaceorum, non marinorum, succinta historia (Copenhagen: Heinek & Faber, 1773–4) and Animalcula infusoria, f luviatilia et marina, quae detexit, systematice descripsit et ad vivum delineari curavit (Copenhagen: Nicolai Möller, 1786).

174

Christian J. Emden

literally hundreds of dif ferent kinds.22 But while transforming the world of infusoria into an encyclopaedic archive on paper was certainly necessary, it brought with it the question of visual representation. As soon as microscopes provided much greater resolution in the first half of  the nineteenth century, samples were dried and dyed, drawn, labelled, collected between plates of glass, and finally described in excruciating detail, for instance by Christian Gottfried Ehrenberg, a friend and fellow traveller of  Alexander von Humboldt’s, in a study that ran to almost 600 pages and an atlas that sought to show the full spectrum of these organisms: Die Infusionsthierchen als vollkommene Organismen (1838).23 The recording and classification of material, both visually and textually, always stood at the centre of  Ehrenberg’s work, which started with a doctoral dissertation on fungi.24 With his practical emphasis on categorizing as the central task of  the nineteenth-century German Naturforscher, whose work had to proceed within the supportive institutional framework of scientific academies, Ehrenberg’s approach also dif fered from that of  Humboldt, whose work was still very much inf luenced by the strands of  Romantic Naturphilosophie that had developed in the second half of  the eighteenth century. This dif ference becomes particularly obvious with regard to Humboldt’s and Ehrenberg’s philosophical interests. Humboldt was not only in close personal contact with Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, but he also largely embraced the latter’s programme of  Naturphilosophie. As such, he linked work in the empirical sciences back to what Schelling regarded as a positive philosophy that, despite its a priori principles, was supposed to reach beyond the merely conceptual

22 Andrew Pritchard, A History of  Infusoria, Living and Fossil: Arranged According to ‘Die Infusionsthierchen’ of  C.G. Ehrenberg (London: Whittaker & Co., 1845), 12. 23 See Christian Gottfried Ehrenberg, Die Infusionsthierchen als vollkommene Organismen: Ein Blick in das tiefere organische Leben der Natur, nebst einem Atlas von vierundsechzig Kupfertafeln, gezeichnet vom Verfasser (Leipzig: Voss, 1838). 24 See Christian Gottfried Ehrenberg, Sylvae mycologicae Berolinensis (Berlin: Bruschcke, 1818).

Uncertain Things, Visually Enhanced

175

framework of a transcendental philosophy in the tradition of  Kant.25 In some of  Humboldt’s most inf luential publications, such as Ideen zu einer Geographie der Pf lanzen (1807), Schelling appeared as ‘one of  the most profound men of our century,’ and since Humboldt himself was ‘not entirely unacquainted with the spirit of  Schelling’s system’, the results of  the empirical sciences and their methods of description always needed to be linked back to philosophical considerations – empirical theories, Humboldt concluded, remained wholly unsatisfactory.26 Ehrenberg, on the other hand, was not entirely convinced of such philosophical ideals; his philosopher of choice was not Schelling but Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz.27 For Ehrenberg, logic and epistemology took the place of  Naturphilosophie, with a view to a universal language for the natural sciences: such a universal language, connected for Leibniz to the idea of a universal calculus, might always remain somewhat detached from natural language, but it would also provide a system of universal combination and classification that tied in neatly with Ehrenberg’s almost obsessive numbering and labelling of micro-organisms.28 While Ehrenberg’s interest in On the relationship between Humboldt and Schelling, see Petra Werner, Über­ einstimmung oder Gegensatz? Zum widersprüchlichen Verhältnis zwischen A. v. Humboldt und F.W.J. Schelling (Berlin: Alexander-von-Humboldt-Forschungs­stelle, 2000). On Schelling’s Naturphilosophie, its development from as well as break with the Kantian tradition, see Frederick C. Beiser, German Idealism: The Struggle against Subjectivism, 1781–1801 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 483–528, and Robert J. Richards, The Romantic Conception of  Life: Science and Philosophy in the Age of  Goethe (Chicago: University of  Chicago Press, 2002), 128–46. 26 Alexander von Humboldt, Ideen zu einer Geographie der Pf lanzen nebst einem Naturgemälde der Tropenländer, auf  Beobachtungen und Messungen gegründet, welche vom 10ten Grade nördlicher bis zum 10ten Grade südlicher Breite, in den Jahren 1799, 1800, 1801, 1802 und 1803 angestelt worden sind von Al. von Humboldt und A. Bonpland (Tübingen: Cotta, 1807), 5. 27 See, for instance, Christian Gottfried Ehrenberg’s ‘Über die von Leibniz angeregten Ideen: Festrede gehalten am 7. Juli 1853 zur Feier des Leibnizschen Jahrestages’, Bericht über die zur Bekanntmachung geeigneten Verhandlungen der Könliglichen Preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Berlin, 1853, 425–9. 28 See Christian Gottfried Ehrenberg’s ‘Über Leibniz als Gelehrten und dessen Beurtheilung der empirischen Erkenntnis: Festrede am 9. Juli 1857 zur Feier des 25

176

Christian J. Emden

Leibniz was in many ways that of  the philosophical amateur, limited as it was to very specific aspects of  the latter’s œuvre, the fastidious accumulation, classification and description of empirical data and specimens was the main purpose of  his expeditions during the 1820s. Travelling, together with the physician Friedrich Wilhelm Hemprich and the zoologist Martin Hinrich Lichtenstein, through North Africa and the Middle East between 1820 and 1826, he amassed a staggering amount of material, part of which was published only twenty years later.29 Likewise, when he accompanied his friend Humboldt on an expedition to Siberia on behalf of the Russian Tsar, reaching the Altai Mountains at the border with China, Ehrenberg collected and classified biological material with a view to the geographic dif fusion, for instance, of micro-organisms.30 It was during these expeditions, and guided by his earlier interest in micro-organisms, that Ehrenberg specifically turned to infusoria, starting what can perhaps best be understood as an obsession with the description and visual fixation of extremely small

Leibnizschen Jahrestages’, Monatsberichte der Königlichen Preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Berlin, 1857, 394–400, and ‘Leibnizens Plan einer allgemeinen Sprache besonders in ihrem Verhältnisse zur Naturforschung: Festrede gehalten am 3. Juli 1862 zur Feier des Leibnizschen Jahrestages’, Monatsberichte der Königlichen Preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Berlin, 1862, 431–2. 29 See Friedrich Wilhelm Hemprich and Christian Gottfried Ehrenberg, Naturgeschichtliche Reise durch Nord-Africa und West-Asien, Historischer Theil: Reisen in Aegypten, Libyen, Nubien und Dongola (Berlin: Mittler, 1928). See also the description in Alexander von Humboldt, ‘Bericht über die Naturhistorischen Reisen der Herren Ehrenberg und Hemprich durch Ägypten, Dongola, Syrien, Arabien und des östlichen Abfall des Habessinischen Hochlandes, in den Jahren 1820–25’, Abhandlungen der Königlichen Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Berlin, 1826, 111–34, and Erwin Stresemann, Hemprich und Ehrenberg: Reisen zweier naturforschender Freunde im Orient geschildert in ihren Briefen aus den Jahren 1819–1826 (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1954). 30 See Gustav Rose, Reise nach dem Ural, dem Altai und dem Kaspischen Meere, auf  Befehl Sr. Majestät des Kaisers von Russland im Jahre 1829 ausgeführt von A. von Humboldt, G. Ehrenberg und G. Rose (Berlin: Sander, 1837–42).

Uncertain Things, Visually Enhanced

177

life forms, which – enriched by samples from other German expeditions around the globe – reached increasingly global dimensions.31 Ehrenberg’s scientific practice, of course, was dependent on three dif ferent tools that every Naturforscher had to rely on: notebooks, specimens, and drawings. While the notebooks can mainly be regarded as a kind of conduit which allowed the transformation of empirical observations, carried out either in the field or in the laboratory, into published articles, Ehrenberg himself paid particular attention to the collection and preservation of  his specimens as well as to the translation of  these specimens into visual evidence. Whereas the information in notebooks could relatively easily be categorized and classified, tangible specimens and their visual representation required more complex, practical interventions before they could assume the status of evidence and fact. The textual descriptions and classifications of  his material were of secondary importance for Ehrenberg, even though the size of  the actual text in his Die Infusionsthierchen als vollkommene Organismen greatly surpasses the size of  the atlas volume. To be sure, the detailed descriptions and the extremely rigorous classification scheme undoubtedly stabilized the broad diversity of infusoria as a scientific fact, enlarging and correcting most of  the existing body of  knowledge. But the enormous diversity of infusoria could only become a stabilized scientific fact if  they were successfully preserved as tangible evidence. Ehrenberg was indeed surprisingly successful in the preservation of  his samples, and twenty-four years after the publication of  his study he happily communicated his own surprise to the Prussian Academy of  Science in Berlin.32 At the same time, the collected infusoria – dried, placed between

31

32

See Christian Gottfried Ehrenberg, ‘Die geographische Verbreitung der Infusions­ thierchen in Nord-Afrika und West-Asien, beobachtet auf  Hemprichs und Ehrenbergs Reisen’, Abhandlungen der Königlichen Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Berlin, 1829, 1–20, and ‘Beiträge zur Kenntnis der Organisation der Infusorien und ihrer geographischen Verbreitung, besonders in Sibirien’, Abhandlungen der Königlichen Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Berlin, 1830, 1–88. See Christian Gottfried Ehrenberg, ‘Über die seit 27 Jahren noch wohl erhaltenen Organisations-Präparate des mikroskopischen Lebens’, Abhandlungen der Königlichen Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Berlin, 1862, 39–74.

178

Christian J. Emden

two plates of glass, and labelled – also had to provide an archive of  tightly controlled samples against which new knowledge could be measured: Finally it is necessary to mention the possibility of  building collections of all kinds of dried infusoria, which on the one hand provide us with the scientific advantage to compare these small forms of organic life with one another, and on the other hand they can become a guarantee [Bürgschaft] for the accuracy of  the reports about objects that seemingly cannot be controlled [Richtigkeit der Mittheilungen über scheinbar aller Controlle entbehrende Gegenstände].33

The lack of control Ehrenberg mentions has, in part, certainly to do with the enormous diversity of infusoria: several thousand species in ponds and streams, in soil, deep in the ocean, in sediment, or even in rocks. The question, then, was how to gain control over this material. Listing and describing the infusoria was certainly one possibility, but the more successful and seemingly more immediate way was to render the tangible collections into images that were more mobile than the collections themselves. While the latter had to be stored and moved in wooden boxes, images could travel more lightly. It was the sixty-four plates that make up the second volume of  Ehrenberg’s study that directly contributed to the visual standardization of infusoria, but also introduced a set of uncertainties that Ehrenberg, surprisingly, celebrated: Everything I have included here I have observed myself, all drawings I have prepared myself. These drawings form the basis of  the textual descriptions, they have been composed [entworfen] with as much diligence as possible and have been verified multiple times and, as representations of organic life [Darstellungen des Lebendigen], they are not copies [Abzeichnungen] but composite images [Compositionen] made of many observations, in a manner they cannot be made by a painter who is not the observer himself.34

Ehrenberg was interested neither in a representation of nature that stressed individual characteristics nor in an aesthetically pleasing, or artistic, 33 Ehrenberg, Die Infusionsthierchen als vollkommene Organismen, vol. I, xvii. 34 Ibid., vol. I, xiv.

Uncertain Things, Visually Enhanced

179

idealization. Too much visual diversity was as much a threat to control as was too little. This was a particular problem precisely because, in the end, the images were more important than either his textual descriptions or his material collection, and throughout the following years he found it inevitable both to widen and to correct the visual material he had already published.35 Even the material samples of  his collection only counted visually, that is, each specimen was to be regarded as though it was, already, an ‘image’.36 Ehrenberg’s reference to specimens already being images renders obvious the problem he was facing: as epistemic images, his infusoria were both visual evidence and tangible material, that is, as images they existed in a peculiar third state in which they were not yet detached from the objects that generated them, without having become fully standardized. To be sure, like other scientific atlases of  the nineteenth century, Ehrenberg’s visual plates, on the one hand, take part in the standardization of  knowledge. As Lorraine Datson and Peter Galison rightly comment: ‘Atlas images underpin other forms of scientific visualization: they define the working objects of disciplines and at the same time cultivate what might be called the disciplinary eye.’37 On the other hand, as a compilation of  ‘working objects’, they can also produce novelty, that is, they introduce new ways of seeing and ruptures in the self-perception of any given discipline. It is in this respect that atlases highlight ‘epistemic instability’ within any given discipline.38 The standardization of  knowledge provided by the atlases, 35

See, for instance, Christian Gottfried Ehrenberg, ‘Dokumentation von 274 Blättern von ihm selbst angefertigter Zeichnungen von eben so vielen Arten in dem 1838 erschienenen grösseren Infusorienwerke noch nicht abgebildeter Infusorien, mit Verzeichnis derselben’, Bericht über die zur Bekanntmachung geeigneten Verhandlungen der Königlich Preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Berlin, 1840, 197–219, and ‘Präparate, Zeichnungen und Nachrichten über das kleinste organische Leben an mehreren bisher noch nicht untersuchten Erdpunkten’, Bericht über die zur Bekanntmachung geeigneten Verhandlungen der Königlichen Preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Berlin, 1845, 304–21 and 357–77. 36 Ehrenberg, Die Infusionsthierchen als vollkommene Organismen, vol. I, xvii. 37 Daston and Galison, Objectivity, 22 and 48. 38 Ibid., 50.

180

Christian J. Emden

and manifest in the scientific self, is always undermined by the scientific images as working objects open to change, and for Ehrenberg, such working objects were both material and visual at the same time.

II.  The life of  technical images By 1838, when Ehrenberg published his Die Infusionsthierchen als vollkommene Organismen, self-registering devices began to be used, for instance, in physiology and meteorology, recording and representing natural objects and events with limited human interference. The transformation of natural events and objects into curves and diagrams, however, lacked the seeming immediacy of photography.39 Joseph Nicéphore Niépce’s earliest surviving photograph, a view from a window in the village of  Saint-Loupde-Varennes in eastern France, may predate Ehrenberg’s atlas of infusoria by more than a decade, but photography would enter the repertoire of scientific tools only after 1839, when the first Daguerrotypes became available, and after 1840, once William Henry Fox Talbot had introduced the calotype process. Not surprisingly, Ehrenberg himself  followed these and subsequent developments with much interest, enthusiastically greeting the advent of photographic forms of representing nature in a later article of 1866.40 39 See Soraya de Chadarevian, ‘“Die Methode der Kurven” in der Physiologie zwischen 1850 und 1900’, in Hans-Jörg Rheinberger and Michael Hagner, eds, Die Experimentalisierung des Lebens: Experimentalsysteme in den biologischen Wissenschaften 1850/1950 (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1993), 28–49. Of course, as soon as photography became available, previous technologies were quickly connected to it. See, for instance, Francis Ronalds, ‘On Photographic Self-Registering Meteorological and Magnetical Instruments’, Abstracts of  the Papers Communicated to the Royal Society of  London 5 (1843–50), 662–3. 40 See Christian Gottfried Ehrenberg, ‘Über wissenschaftlich bemerkenswerte Fortschritte der Photographie in America wie in Europa’, Monatsberichte der Königlichen Preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Berlin, 1866, 657–65. On the immediate link between science and photography, albeit limited to Britain, see

Uncertain Things, Visually Enhanced

181

Talbot certainly dreamt in his The Pencil of  Nature (1844–6) of photography, or rather: Talbotype, as providing a representation of nature without human intervention. Quite in contrast to traditional drawings, engravings, and lithographs, the plates of  his work, as he noted in his short introduction, ‘are impressed by the agency of  Light alone, without any aid whatever from the artist’s pencil. They are the sun-pictures themselves, and not, as some persons have imagined, engravings in imitation.’41 Talbot’s book was clearly intended to introduce to the discerning public a new method for the registration of  both nature and the human environment at large, a method that promised a new and radical naturalism in visual representation. Commenting on his third plate, ‘Articles of  China’, which depicts four artistically arranged rows of delicate porcelain urns, baskets, pots, figurines, and cups on shelves, he noted: From the specimen here given it is suf ficiently manifest, that the whole cabinet of a Virtuoso and collector of old China might be depicted on paper in little more time than it would take him to make a written inventory describing it in the usual way. The more strange and fantastic the forms of  his old teapots, the more advantage in having their pictures given instead of  their descriptions.42

From the point of view of  the photographer, the technical image was far more successful in taking account of  the unusual and strange than either the human eye or conceptual description. While Leeuwenhoek and Trembley, despairing about the novelty of  living things under the microscope, resorted to lengthy written descriptions, and while Ehrenberg sought to compensate for the instability of  the image by obsessively classifying living things, the photographic plate could register the new and unusual before the human mind was able to integrate such novel objects into its existing conceptual framework.

Jennifer Tucker, Nature Exposed: Photography as Eyewitness in Victorian Science (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), 17–64. 41 William Henry Fox Talbot, The Pencil of  Nature (London: Longman, Brown, Green and Longman’s, 1844), unpaginated. 42 Ibid.

182

Christian J. Emden

Connecting the camera to the microscope, and taking pictures of  finely detailed wings of insects, plant stems, and feathers, Talbot presented a visual argument that the photographic plate not only showed the objects of nature more clearly than the human eye, but that it was also able to represent what was hidden from view, for instance the interference patterns of polarized light transmitted through a crystal.43 But Talbot’s main concern was ‘fixing the image in such a manner that it is no more liable to injury or destruction’ – after further chemical treatment of  the image he waited for up to five years to see whether the image would fade.44 The technical image, the final calotype, was always already characterized by an ambivalence that marks all technical images, regardless of whether they are based on photochemical processes or mathematical algorithms: the image consists of  both the technical process and the depiction of something, but if depiction is supposed to be emphasized, as in the case of visual evidence, then the technical process needs to be relegated to the background. But what is seen as unmediated visual evidence is already mediated. The most direct access to nature does not depict anything at all; it is a pure photochemical trace, or the detection of particles as in the case of  the counting experiments whose principles lie at the core of contemporary fMRI scanners. The visual evidence, as it were, comes later and is always secondary, while the technicality of  the image more often than not interferes with and disturbs what is needed as visual evidence. Photochemical processes, as Peter Geimer has shown, tend to have a life of  their own. The epistemic status of  the photographic images of galaxies, 43 See the images in Anthony Burnett-Brown, Michael Gray, and Russell Roberts, Specimens and Marvels: William Henry Fox Talbot and the Invention of  Photography (New York: Aperture, 2000), 14–23 und 74–5. See also Douglas R. Nickel, ‘Nature’s Supernaturalism: William Henry Fox Talbot and Botanical Illustration’, in Kathleen S. Howe, ed., Intersections: Lithography, Photography, and the Traditions of Printmaking (Albuquerque, NM: University of  New Mexico Press, 1998), 15–23, and Graham Smith, ‘Talbot and Botany: The Bertoloni Album’, History of  Photography 17 (1993), 33–48. 44 William Henry Fox Talbot, ‘Some Account of  the Art of  Photogenic Drawing’, in Vicki Goldberg, ed., Photography in Print: Writings from 1816 to the Present (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1981), 36–48: 38.

Uncertain Things, Visually Enhanced

183

crystals, and bacteria can be radically uncertain: are they accidents of  the photochemical process, or do they really exist in the way they appear on the photographic plate?45 Even Robert Koch, whose studies of  bacteria generally state the enormous potential of connecting the microscope to a photographic camera, thus creating a more ef ficient experimental system for the observation of  bacteria, had to admit that he was occasionally confused and initially attributed some of  the biological features he observed to faulty equipment. It was only by altering the experimental setting, and by introducing lenses with a greater magnifying power, that he came to realize that these ‘faults’ were actually a feature of  the objects under observation.46 Within the history of seeing, as James Elkins has argued, the tension between novel things and existing conceptual frameworks is of crucial importance.47 The discovery and description of new biological entities, for instance, often follows some kind of visual analogy that seeks to bring the new into line with what the observer already regards as familiar and as a certain part of existing knowledge. Seeing a new swarm of  bacilli through a microscope, for instance, always takes place within the context of comparison: that is, both the newness of  the observed entities as well as their identification as bacilli requires that they are, visually, related back to a relatively stable collection of images, specimens, and observations. Analogies and metaphorical translations play a central role in scientific observation. Following the conceptual chaos of eighteenth-century microscopic research, Elkins has shown, however, that such visual analogies can indeed break down, and often do break down, when it is unclear what is actually seen.48 The dream of direct access to nature is always limited by the visual evidence itself, which at times is able to destabilize what can be 45 See Peter Geimer, Bilder aus Versehen: Eine Geschichte fotografischer Erscheinungen (Hamburg: Philo Fine Arts, 2009). 46 See Robert Koch, ‘Untersuchungen über Bacterien, VI: Verfahren zum Conserviren und Photographiren der Pf lanzen’, Beiträge zur Biologie der Pf lanzen 2 (1877), 399– 434: 408. 47 See James Elkins, ‘On Visual Desperation and the Bodies of Protozoa’, Representations 40 (1992), 33–56: 33–4. 48 See ibid., 35–9 and 43–5.

184

Christian J. Emden

seen. Neither fMRI nor PET, to give two more recent examples, are able to register and represent brain activity in real time; they measure changes in the blood f low and oxygen levels that appear one to three seconds after the respective neuronal activity and that are registered by the scanner five to eight seconds after the initial change in neuronal activity – a considerable time dif ference as far as brain activity is concerned.49 Furthermore, the increasing size of  the technical devices themselves, including the strength of  the magnetic fields involved in fMRI scanners, requires an increasing level of  technical expertise: the more images of  the brain, because of  their high resolution, seem to allow for an unmediated access to brain activity, the more technicians control what scientists are able to ‘see’.50 What appears on the image, then, is not the thinking human brain, or consciousness, but rather a representation of a representation, that is, a hemodynamic reaction that is taken to represent neuronal activity, which is then transferred – via complex algorithms – into a digital image. The result of such uncertainty with regard to the nature of visual evidence is what Elkins terms ‘visual desperation’51 – a desperation that highlights the limits of  the evidentiary paradigm of immediacy. The idea of an unmediated access to nature, and of a direct representation of nature, that lies at the core of  the scientific image’s epistemic authority, ultimately relies on its very opposite: it is a result of  the need to alter the trace, or inscription, in order to turn it into a useful image. Visual desperation needs to 49 See Marcia Barinaga, ‘New Imaging Methods Provide a Better View into the Brain’, Science, new series 276 (1997), 1974–6: 1975; Thomas J. Grabowski and Antonio R. Damasio, ‘Improving Functional Imaging Techniques: The Dream of a Single Image for a Single Mental Event’, Proceedings of  the National Academy of  Sciences of  the United States of  America 92 (1996), 14302–3; Marcus E. Raichle, ‘Behind the Scenes of  Functional Brain Imaging: A Historical and Physiological Perspective’, Proceedings of  the National Academy of  Sciences of  the United States of  America 95 (1998), 765–72: 771; and, from a more technical point of view, Kenneth K. Kwong, John W. Belliveau, David A. Chesler, et al., ‘Dynamic Magnetic Resonance Imaging of  Human Brain Activity during Primary Sensory Stimulation’, Proceedings of  the National Academy of  Sciences of  the United States of  America 89 (1992), 5675–9. 50 See Barinaga, ‘New Imaging Methods Provide a Better View into the Brain’, 1975. 51 Elkins, ‘On Visual Desperation and the Bodies of  Protozoa,’ 35 and 43–5.

Uncertain Things, Visually Enhanced

185

be countered by an intervention in the material itself, that is, by making it more defined. This is certainly the case with regard to images produced by contemporary fMRI scanners: it is often necessary, as one textbook notes, to ‘improve’ the image, erasing noise, introducing colour codings, enhancing particular areas, and superimposing, or layering, dif ferent images.52 Astronomy, to give another example, often tends to produce two dif ferent kinds of images: on the one hand, there are colourful images that are of no direct scientific relevance but that, in popular books and magazines, make the astronomical imagery circulate among wider publics and, thus, lead to a commodification of  these pictures; on the other hand, there are mainly black-and-white images for scientific publications that serve the needs of demonstrating a particular research result.53 What unites these images, despite the very dif ferent publics they seek to address, is that they are cleaned up, so that significant details are emphasized, others are erased, patterns are generated, and interference is eliminated. What is often seen, and presented to a wider public, as an evidentiary paradigm of immediacy requires a perfection of  the image and, by implication, a perfection of what is seen as reality, in much the same way as autoradiographs, whether produced by x-rays or nuclear emulsion, are corrected depending on which characteristics of the image are deemed relevant within the context of a particular experiment.54 Moreover, such improvements and enhancements are part of  the wider economy of scientific work: external pressures by funding bodies, the need for quick publication and unambiguous conclusions, and the competition or intersection with other research groups produces mechanisms that filter scientific results and organize scientific practice. Such mechanisms emerge

52

See Donald W. McRobbie, Elizabeth A. Moore, Martin J. Graves, and Martin R. Prince, MRI: From Picture to Proton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2003), 77–105. 53 See Michael Lynch and Samuel Edgerton, ‘Aesthetics and Digital Image Processing: Representational Craft in Contemporary Astronomy’, in Gordon Fyfe and John Law, eds, Picturing Power: Visual Depiction and Social Relations (New York: Routledge, 1988), 184–220. 54 See Karin Knorr-Cetina and Klaus Amann, ‘Image Dissection in Natural Scientific Inquiry’, Science, Technology and Human Values 4 (1990), 259–80.

186

Christian J. Emden

especially in the context of  fairly new disciplines that require considerable funding, such as the neurosciences and neuroimaging during the 1970s and 1980s or the current work of  the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. The need to justify research vis-à-vis public funding bodies is as crucial in this context as the popularization of  the neurosciences and high-energy physics among a wider public.55 Most importantly, however, the publication of scientific research, accompanied by image material, is surprisingly detached from the actual scientific practice. The emergence of a scientific fact, so to speak, has to rely on decoupling this fact from ongoing scientific practice.56 Epistemic images, on the other hand, belong to the realm of  the ‘mangle of practice’. In the same way as the experiences of  ‘everyday life’ have the ‘character of coping with material agency, agency that comes at us from outside the human realm and that cannot be reduced to anything within that realm’, scientific practices, together with the technological arrangements that are part of such practice, are ‘a continuation and extension of  this business of coping with material agency.’57 But if epistemic images are supposed to serve as visual evidence, and thus as representations of  facts, they need to be detached from this mangle of practice.

III.  The productive instability of epistemic images It is now necessary to draw some conclusions from the discussion thus far. First of all, pure representation of nature is as irrelevant to scientific practice as it is unachievable. Experimental systems – the devices and machines we 55

See Susan Leigh Star, ‘Simplification in Scientific Work: An Example from Neuroscience Research’, Social Studies of  Science 13 (1983), 205–28: 218–20. 56 See ibid., 224–5. See also Ludwik Fleck, Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact, ed. Thaddeus J. Trenn and Robert K. Merton, trans. Fred Bradley and Thaddeus J. Trenn (Chicago: University of  Chicago Press, 1971), 38–51 and 125–42. 57 Andrew Pickering, The Mangle of  Practice: Time, Agency, and Science (Chicago: University of  Chicago Press, 1995), 6–7.

Uncertain Things, Visually Enhanced

187

construct in order to observe natural events and entities more clearly than would otherwise be possible – always follow a logic of intervention. Such interventions should not be reduced, however, to what Bruno Latour and others, taking their cue from Gaston Bachelard, have termed ‘phenomenotechnique’ or ‘technoscience’, that is, a scientific reality in which the production of what is seen as facts is exclusively dependent on the machines that make these facts appear so as to suggest, at the very least, that the facts in question do not have existence outside, or beyond, the machines.58 Along similar lines, Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, who presented molecular biology as embodying a ‘transpositivistic challenge to objectivity’ since experimental systems are bound up with the material objects under observation, argued for a notion of scientific practice that favours representation over intervention in the material world.59 The ‘epistemic things’ generated in the laboratory, albeit bound up with the material world of  the experimental arrangements, are, in ef fect, forms of representation.60 The material world, then, only becomes an object of scientific interest precisely because it is part of a process of representation. Things that are not represented, and things that cannot be represented in one way or another, fall outside the realm of scientific practice.

See Gaston Bachelard, La formation de l’esprit scientifique: Contribution à une psychanalye de la connaissance objective, 11th edn (Paris: Vrin, 1980), 61; Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar, Laboratory Life: The Construction of  Scientific Facts, 2nd edn (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), 64; and Bruno Latour, Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers Through Society (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), 174–5. Bachelard first introduced the notion of  ‘phenomenotechnique’ during the early 1930s. See his ‘Noumène et microphysique’, in Études (Paris: Vrin, 1970), 11–24. On the role of phenomenotechnique in Bachelard’s epistemology, see also the accounts in Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, ‘Gaston Bachelard and the Notion of  Phenomenotechnique’, Perspectives on Science 13 (2005), 313–28; Teresa Castelão-Lawless, ‘Phenomenotechnique in Historical Perspective: Its Origins and Implications for Philosophy of  Science’, Philosophy of  Science 62 (1995), 44–59: 50–2; and Stephen W. Gaukroger, ‘Bachelard and the Problem of  Epistemological Analysis’, Studies in the History and Philosophy of  Science 7 (1976), 189–244. 59 See Rheinberger, Toward a History of  Epistemic Things, 22 and 28. 60 See ibid., 104, 112–13, and 225–6. 58

188

Christian J. Emden

To conceive of scientific practice as primarily representational practice, I would contend, is to some extent suggestive of a false epistemological alternative: either we assume the position of a physicalist naturalism, without paying much attention to the way in which our normative claims about nature are shaped by the technologies and representations we use, or we adopt an equally reductionist account of scientific practice as generating a world of signs detached from the material world. Rather, in the same way as Bachelard noted that instrumentation is a reified, or materialized, theory about the world, about the objects under investigation, I would argue that epistemic images are embedded both in the experimental systems that generate them and the material world of which these experimental systems – together with the events, entities, and phenomena under investigation – are themselves a part. To be sure, Rheinberger’s sophisticated account of  the way in which new objects, and new forms of  knowledge with unpredictable consequences, are produced is very much engaged in the material world of molecular biology between the late 1940s and mid-1960s. Indeed, his notion of epistemic things is clearly intended to undercut traditional dichotomies between representational models, theories, and methods, on the one hand, and the material world, on the other.61 Epistemic things, after all, ‘are material entities or processes – physical structures, chemical reactions, biological functions – that constitute the objects of inquiry.’62 But epistemic things, above all, lead to a notion of  the scientific real as a world of  traces, that is, representations and models that can only be compared with each other, and that ultimately do not require the existence of a referent. The question, nevertheless, is whether such comparisons are entirely detached from the material world, or whether they can and should be understood as an intervention in the material world after all. As part of scientific practice, things and images are certainly not fixed, but they are part of a wider dynamic, or process, that is marked by a vagueness, unpredictability, and uncertainty that renders pure representation as well as pure empiricism impossible. This

61 See ibid., 112. 62 Ibid., 28.

Uncertain Things, Visually Enhanced

189

uncertainty, or rather, the ambivalence of  things and images, comes to the fore especially in those cases when experimental systems both detach the objects under investigation from nature by altering them and seemingly bring them closer to nature at the same time – by altering them. The production of scientific knowledge always entails the production of epistemic instability. It is precisely such instability that comes to the fore in what I have described as epistemic images. Drawing on Carl Weigert’s method for using aniline dye to colour bacteria he found in organ tissue, and following Christian Gottfried Ehrenberg’s suggestion that the bacteria samples be dried as quickly as possible, Robert Koch, for instance, begins to manipulate his experimental system in order to achieve more realistic and precise photographic images of  bacteria: Against drying the bacteria we have to raise the objection, of course, that – as experience with other microscopic objects [Gegenständen] teaches us – it must change the structure [Gestalt] of  the bacteria in a most significant manner. I too was convinced of  this and was hoping to obtain their original form only after maceration. But already during my first experiments along these lines I saw much to my astonishment that, unlike most infusoria, monads, microscopic plants, the bacteria did not dissolve or shrivel into an amorphous mass, but that they stick to the glass like rigid bodies surrounded by a mucous membrane and that they dry without changing their structure in any significant way, especially with regard to their length and width.63

Indeed, the structure of  the bacteria is not only preserved but, as Koch continued with reference to several of  his photographs, the ‘structure of 

63 Koch, ‘Untersuchungen über Bacterien, VI’, 403. On colouring and drying bacteria, see Carl Weiger, Über pockenähnliche Gebilde in parenchymatösen Organen und deren Beziehung zu Bacteriencolonien: Eine pathologisch-anatomische Abhandlung behufs seiner Habilitation, der Fakultät der Königl. Universität zu Breslau vorgelegt und am 2. Juni 1875 öf fentlich verteidigt (Breslau: Jung, 1875), and Ehrenberg, Die Infusionsthierchen als vollkommene Organismen, vol. I, xvii. For a contemporary account of  Weigert’s methods, see Friedrich Löf f ler, Vorlesungen über die geschichtliche Entwicklung der Lehre von den Bacterien, für Aerzte und Studirende: Erster Theil bis zum Jahre 1878 (Leipzig: Vogel, 1887), 213–15.

190

Christian J. Emden

filaments becomes more precise’, while colouring the bacteria furthermore makes the ‘fine grained interior substance [Inhalt] emerge more vividly.’64 For Koch, then, altering the material of  his observations brings his images closer to nature in that they begin to emphasize what is most important and pertinent, while the alterations themselves do not merely enhance or improve the material under observation but rather change the epistemic status of  this material. Spontaneously moving bacteria and similar living organisms are rather dif ficult to observe and photograph under nineteenth-century laboratory conditions. Although Koch’s experimental system – including a microscope with a 700-fold magnification connected to a photographic plate – constitutes a considerable advantage over earlier arrangements, the bacteria themselves need to be drastically altered, that is, they become objects of  knowledge only once the experimental system has intervened in the material world, turning the bacteria into laboratory artefacts. The images of  Koch’s bacteria become epistemic images precisely because the bacteria themselves have been changed. For good reason, Koch is certain that he received better images and, in a sense, better bacteria by following Ehrenberg’s advice to draw moisture from the samples with blotting paper.65 Ehrenberg stated the ef fect of such interventions surprisingly clearly: ‘Every one of  these dried animalcules is like an image [Jedes dieser getrockneten Thierchen ist wie ein Bild].’66 The material itself, in other words, becomes the image; they are one and the same. The uncertainty of  the image is part of scientific practice as well as driving such practice in one direction or another. Beyond the uncertainty and ambiguity of epistemic images, there is also a second point to be made. The way in which experimental systems ‘create’ new objects, and what Rheinberger termed ‘epistemic things’, by intervening in the material world does not necessarily result in a shift toward mere representation, that is, towards traces and inscriptions that, in one way or another, can be seen as detached from the material world.

64 Koch, ‘Untersuchungen über Bacterien, VI’, 430. 65 See Ehrenberg, Die Infusionsthierchen als vollkommene Organismen, vol. I, xvii. 66 Ibid.

Uncertain Things, Visually Enhanced

191

As Rheinberger himself noted: ‘Scientific activity notoriously consists in undercutting the opposition between representation and referent, between “model” and “nature”.’67 It is crucial, however, that the material dimension of epistemic things is itself already a representation in that the ‘scientific object is re-presented in being produced’.68 Rheinberger’s ‘epistemic things’, in other words, are always already one step removed from nature, and in a certain sense the material world is not necessary as a referent. This conclusion seems to me to lead to a somewhat radical form of representationalism. Despite his own insistence that the notion of epistemic things stands for the primacy of  the material world in experimental systems, Rheinberger thus begins to move in a direction where the material world is dissolved into the world of representations. Indeed, in a not entirely surprising turn toward Jean Baudrillard’s theory of simulation, it is precisely the material world that becomes secondary: ‘The concept of reality only makes sense within a context of replication’, so that the task of scientific practice is ‘[t]o bring alternative spaces of representation into existence’.69 The problem of  Rheinberger’s account, then, is that ‘undercutting the opposition between representation and referent’ tends to lead into a representationalism without the need for a referent. Koch’s bacteria, like Ehrenberg’s infusoria, however, remain part of  the material world, even though they only emerge as such once they have turned into an image. They are origin and trace at the same time, and it is this ambiguity that is inscribed into bacteria and infusoria as epistemic images. They are, in other words, not mere representations, or traces, or inscriptions, but as representations they also possess an irreducible materiality. Leeuwenhoek’s ‘aquatick insects’, Trembley’s freshwater hydra, Koch’s bacteria, once they are photographed, and Ehrenberg’s infusoria, once they end up fixated between two plates of glass, neither represent what is ‘out there’ nor do they merely produce a representation. Rather, they are, as epistemic images, constitutive parts of

67 Rheinberger, Toward a History of  Epistemic Things, 112. 68 Ibid. 69 Ibid., 113, referring to Jean Baudrillard, Simulations, trans. Paul Foss, Paul Paton, and Philip Beitchman (New York: Semiotext[e], 1983), 31–2 and 146.

192

Christian J. Emden

a process of intervening in the material world. Epistemic images produce a specific kind of reality that cannot readily be detached from the image and that only exists as the image. At the same time, epistemic images remain interventions in the material world and are, as a result, also part of the latter. They are the site where mediality and materiality come together – albeit without dissolving the one into the other.

Hannah Landecker

The Metabolism of  Philosophy, in Three Parts

In physiology there are always two things to consider: 1. the organism 2. the environment. The same consideration can be repeated everywhere. There are 1. the materials that come from without. 2. the organic force. There are: 1. Man and his genius. 2. the circumstances in which he finds himself. There are: 1. the tree. 2. the earth in which it grows. There are 1. the cow. 2. her nourishment. There are: 1. the facts. 2. their explanation. There are: 1. Man and his genius. 2. his work and perseverance. There are: 1. Man and his genius. 2. the nature of  the science with which he is occupied which makes him more or less reproachable. — Fragment from the Cahier Rouge of  Claude Bernard, dated 18501

Metabolism is everywhere and nowhere. It is: ‘The chemical processes that occur within a living organism in order to maintain life; the interconnected sequences of mostly enzyme-catalysed chemical reactions by which a cell, tissue, organ, etc., sustains energy production, and synthesizes and breaks down complex molecules.’2 Metabolism is a set – it does not consist in any one reaction, but is a cumulus of interlocking cycles. It is in cells and between cells, in organs and between organs. It is individual and communal.3 It is the interface between inside and outside, the space of conversion of one to another, of matter to energy, of substrate to waste, 1 2 3

Claude Bernard, The Cahier Rouge of  Claude Bernard, trans. Hebbel Hof f, Lucien Guillemin and Roger Guillemin (Cambridge, MA: Schenkman, 1967), 8. ‘metabolism, n.’, OED Online (Oxford University Press, June 2012), accessed 12 July 2012. John Dupré and Maureen O’Malley, ‘Varieties of  Living Things: Life at the Intersection of  lineage and metabolism’, Philosophy and Theory in Biology 1:e0003 (2009).

194

Hannah Landecker

of synthesis and breakdown. A process-thing, it is always in time. It is one of  the ‘most widely agreed criteria for being a living thing …’ for biologists and philosophers alike.4 Its history as a scientific object is detailed and thorough, for disciplines crystallized around its delineation:5 ‘The ultimate aim of  biochemists,’ wrote J.B.S. Haldane in the 1930s, ‘may be stated as a complete account of intermediary metabolism, that is to say, of  the transformations undergone by matter in passing through organisms.’6 For such an interesting and curious in-between concept, one whose own definition constitutes a definition of  life, metabolism by the end of  the twentieth century became curiously muted and closed, a canonical matter for textbooks, not interrogation. This is, I believe, because of  two linked historical developments. In the nineteenth century, the body was commonly regarded as analogous to a combustion engine, into which one fed fuel. Legions of experimenters studied humans and animals as though they were balance sheets, accounting for everything that went in, and everything that came out, in rooms designed to record every joule of  heat, every exertion, and every exhalation.7 From this era we have inherited the idea and instrument that is the calorie, the great general equivalent by which dif ferent foods are compared for their energy content.8 In the twentieth century, scientists began to focus on questions of intermediary 4 5 6

7

8

Ibid., 12. Harmke Kamminga and Mark Weatherall, ‘The Making of a Biochemist I: Frederick Gowland Hopkins’ Construction of a Dynamic Biochemistry’, Medical History 40 (1996), 269–92. John Burdon Sanderson Haldane, ‘The Biochemistry of  the Individual’, in Joseph Needham and David E. Green, eds, Perspectives in Biochemistry: Thirty-One Essays Presented to Sir Frederick Gowland Hopkins By Past and Present Members of  His Laboratory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1938), 1–10. Frederic Lawrence Holmes, ‘The Intake-Output Method of  Quantification in Physiology’, Historical Studies in the Physical and Biological Sciences 17 (1987), 235–70; Naomi Aronson, ‘Nutrition as a Social Problem: A Case Study in Entrepreneurial Strategies in Science’, Social Problems 29 (1982), 474–87. See Marion Nestle and Malden Nesheim, Why Calories Count: From Science to Politics (Berkeley: University of  California Press, 2012), for a history of  the calorie and an example of  the contemporary political uses of  the calorie concept.

The Metabolism of  Philosophy, in Three Parts

195

metabolism, the biochemistry of what happened in cells and tissues in between eating and excretion. The delineation of detailed maps of  the complex chemical reactions along every step of  the way was thus added to earlier triumphs of accounting for the law-like nature of conversions of energy and matter moving through the body, but without serious break with the balance-sheet framework; it filled in rather than broke with the frame. In combination, this double pinning-down of enduring mysteries of continuity, substance and individuation contributed to a powerful sense of metabolism as a stable and known quantity. Question: how do organisms eat other organisms and yet persist as themselves? Answer: organisms persist by converting the world into themselves. It has seemed for some time now that we know what goes in, we know what happens to it inside, and we know what comes out. Mystery solved. In no small part due to material crises of  twenty-first-century health, the concept of metabolism in the sciences is becoming unstable once more. If metabolism is a known quantity, then why the apparent crises of diabetes and obesity? Metabolism is in the midst of re-emergence as the site of intensive new research, and thus is becoming a concept of unknown parameters again.9 This essay of fers a parallel re-opening of  the concept for the human sciences. In the context of  this volume, the question taken up here is the historical role of metabolism as a third concept, one with particular utility in the face of  the enduring antithesis of organism and environment.10 The question is not so much where the concept of metabolism came from, as what it was good for. The historical treatment of  these uses may well be instructive after several decades of scholarship on the body, and in a time of exploding scholarly interest in food: what might the neither-food-norbody of metabolism do for us today?

9 10

Hannah Landecker, ‘Food as Exposure: Nutritional Epigenetics and the New Metabolism’, BioSocieties 6 (2011), 167–94. J.H. Woodger, Biological Principles: A Critical Study (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1929).

196

Hannah Landecker

I.  Three stories First, concerning livers. The nineteenth-century physiologist Claude Bernard (1813–78) came to his experimental career in a time when his contemporaries were championing a model of  the world in which plants build up the nutritive substances that animals burned – an image of complementary parts of a great cycle of  life. ‘In physiology,’ he noted to himself, jotting in a notebook filled with such fragmentary ref lections and annotations on ongoing experiments, ‘there are always two things to think about.’11 The problem of  the two – the animal and its food, the inner force and the materials that come from without, as well as practical questions of  the French nation and its foodstuf fs – lay at the beginning of  the building, over the next three decades of  Bernard’s career, of  the concept of  the ‘nutritive reserve.’ This was based in the experimental demonstration with excised dog livers that the tissues – freed of  the body and washed of  blood but still living – could from within themselves manufacture sugar. Bernard isolated and named a starch-like substance he found in the liver tissue glycogen. It was manufactured in the animal liver and could be further used to create glucose – food was converted into these stores, to be liberated later, at need. Glycogen in turn provided the empirical ground of a theory of  the nutritive reserve. In Bernard’s view, the reserve was maintained by a ‘perpetual nutritive movement’; in understanding these aspects of nutrition empirically, one was grasping one of  the fundamental common characteristics of  life – all life, not just animals or plants. In his last lectures, published in 1878, The Phenomena of  Life Common to Plants and Animals, Bernard singled out nutrition as being the most universal of  life’s manifestations, and indirect nutrition (through the space and time of  the reserve) as being a fundamental condition of  ‘free life’: autonomy of  the organism from the f luctuations of its surrounding environment.12 11 12

Claude Bernard, The Cahier Rouge of  Claude Bernard, 8. Claude Bernard, Lectures on the Phenomena of  Life Common to Plants and Animals, trans. H.E. Hof f, R. Guillemin, and L. Guillemin (Springfield, IL: Charles Thomas, 1974).

The Metabolism of  Philosophy, in Three Parts

197

Second, concerning isotopes. In the twentieth century, the study of the chemical reactions in cells and tissues that went on between ingestion and energy production or excretion came to be called intermediary metabolism, and constituted the core of  the newly powerful discipline of  biochemistry. The biochemist Rudolf  Schoenheimer (1898–1941) was in the 1930s one of  the first to put the ‘heavy’ isotopes of  hydrogen and nitrogen as tracers for the fate of  foodstuf fs through the metabolic process.13 These experiments directly contradicted ideas established in the early twentieth century, of an ‘endogenous’ and an ‘exogenous’ metabolism, one of  bodily substance and one of energy, one steady and the other f luctuating, largely separate. ‘All constituents of  living matter,’ wrote Schoenheimer, ‘whether functional or structural, of simple or of complex constitution, are in a steady state of rapid f lux.’14 It was a constant process of  ‘molecular regeneration’: all the molecules involved in metabolism were constantly gaining and losing bits, transferring groups of atoms between them, suggesting what he called ‘one great cycle’ of  transformation. One, not two: he rejected the longstanding metaphor of  the body as a machine for which food was fuel, implying that one persisted stably while the other moved through it and was burnt. Whether it was the endogenous/exogenous dualism, the structure/ function or the machine/fuel distinction, Schoenheimer’s intermediary metabolism was an refutation of  two-ness, captured by the distinctive title of  his posthumously published lectures on the subject: The Dynamic State of  Body Constituents. Third, concerning freedom. The philosopher Hans Jonas (1903– 93) published a book in 1966 called The Phenomenon of  Life: Toward a Philosophical Biology, which promised an ‘existential’ interpretation of  biological facts – a ‘new reading of  the biological record [to] recover the inner dimension.’15 One of a generation of  Jewish scholars who f led Germany, 13 14 15

Robert Kohler, ‘Rudolf  Schoenheimer, Isotopic Tracers, and Biochemistry in the 1930s’, Historical Studies in the Physical Sciences 8 (1977), 257–98. Rudolf  Schoenheimer, The Dynamic State of  Body Constituents (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1942), 3. Hans Jonas, The Phenomenon of  Life: Toward a Philosophical Biology (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2001 [1966]), xxiii.

198

Hannah Landecker

Jonas had a particularly meandering route after leaving. He ended up in Canada in 1949, and sought advice from biologist and theorist Ludwig von Bertalanf f y, whom he had never met, but was also funded by the same philanthropist. On Bertalanf f y’s advice, Jonas got a job at Carleton College. Out of  the post-war turbulence that landed these two Europeans in Ottawa came an intense intellectual engagement, and therein lies the historical particularly of  the ‘biological record’ that would provide the metabolism of  Jonas’s philosophy. Bertalanf f y was hard at work in these years bringing his publications on systems theory to an English-speaking audience, and writing empirical papers on metabolism and growth in dif ferent organisms. One of  Jonas’s first publications in English was a commentary in Human Biology in 1951 on Bertalanf f y’s idea of  the organism as an ‘open system.’ While clearly admiring of  the potential of systems theory for biological research, he opined that the problems of mechanism, teleology and wholeness are ‘(to use the disreputable word) metaphysical and not logical issues,’ and were therefore left by systems theory where they had been before.16 The Phenomenon of  Life was clearly an answer to this call to the metaphysics of the open system. In turn, metabolism became for Jonas the ‘unifying dif ference’ of  life.17 ‘Organic form,’ wrote Jonas, ‘stands in a dialectical relation of needful freedom to matter,’ because, literally, an organism has to eat, and any end to this liberating necessity means death.18 The organism/environment dualism was for Jonas not just resolved by metabolism, metabolism became the ground from which this ontology sprung in the first place: metabolism made it possible in the first place for there to be an inside and an outside. As his peers, philosophers and political theorists, circled around problems of  totalitarianism, authoritarianism, mass culture and freedom, Jonas found in the science of intermediary metabolism mateHans Jonas, ‘Comment on General Systems Theory’, Human Biology 23/4 (1951), 328–35. 17 See David Levy, Hans Jonas: The Integrity of  Thinking (Columbia: University of  Missouri Press, 2002). 59: ‘For Jonas metabolism is the unifying work of  life itself, and, as such, the specific dif ference that essentially distinguishes animate from inanimate matter.’ 18 Jonas, The Phenomenon of  Life, 83. 16

The Metabolism of  Philosophy, in Three Parts

199

rial resources for the claiming of  ‘needful freedom’ as a property arising with life itself. A dense thicket of ‘conceptual filiations’ connects the indirect nutrition of  Bernard, the dynamic state of  Schoenheimer, and the needful freedom of  Jonas, portions of which will be unfolded below.19 While certain genealogical lines of inf luence are visible between them, proving inf luence is not the goal. The particular issues they faced dif fer substantially, and therein lies the interest: what binds these three stories in this analysis is a similarity across eras and disciplines of a structure of  thought, not an inheritance of  facts or a matter of personal inf luence. In each case, the conceptual space of metabolism enabled movement through and beyond the problem, as Bernard put it, of  ‘there always being two things to consider.’ The af finity between these structures of  thought across dif ferent problems allows us to better understand the specific historical questions of  the relationship between metabolism, science and philosophy: under what historical conditions did problems of  kinds or ontology make the material findings of experimental science seem to transcend the direct questions of physiology and chemistry that they were designed to answer? In what historical crucible did arcane corners of molecular interaction seem to provide suitable resources for developing a philosophy of  freedom in the wake of  World War II? Looking at the three main texts produced by these thinkers – Phenomena of  Life Common to Plants and Animals, Dynamic State of  Body Constituents, and The Phenomenon of  Life: Toward a Philosophical Biology – af fords access to the concrete ways that people have in this conceptual terrain of metabolism grappled with ontology and questions of substance and continuity, questions of individuation, diversity and unity, necessity and autonomy; a conceptual trajectory that long preceded metabolism, but took distinctive form with its scientific formulation in the nineteenth century.

19

Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, An Epistemology of  the Concrete: Twentieth Century Histories of  Life (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 34.

200

Hannah Landecker

II.  Claude Bernard and the nutritive reserve The fragment from the Cahier Rouge of  Claude Bernard that opens this essay is a telling one: it was early in his career, and he was feeding dogs various substances to see whether claims for the nutritive qualities of gelatin bouillon, made by boiling bones, were warranted. Reformers interested in enhancing the diet of  the poor, the sick and the institutionalized were making strong claims for its benefits, which quickly became so controversial that the French Academy of  Sciences convened a special Gelatin Commission to investigate them. Experiments with dogs were inconclusive (as were outcomes for the people who ate the stuf f ), but it brought Bernard, who would go on to an illustrious career in physiology, to the empirical investigation of problems of nutrition.20 Alimentation was of course, as the fragment indicates, simultaneously a practical and a philosophical challenge. One of  the central findings on which his illustrious career was built was the demonstration that the animal body did not just break down substances such as sugar, but also built them up. His 1848 work, ‘On the origin of sugar in the animal economy’, broke with existing assumptions that animals only decompose what they receive from plants.21 Animals, Bernard argued, both create and destroy sugar; dogs fed sugar, starch, meat, or nothing at all for two days, all have sugar in their blood. This work was followed by a series of experiments showing that the liver could ‘produce sugar from a substance within itself.’22 This substance could be extracted from the tissue, and then fermented to yield sugar. Appreciation of  the distinctive temporality of  this creative power within the body – which led Bernard to be the first to insist that digestion and nutrition are separate processes,

20 Frederic Lawrence Holmes, Claude Bernard and Animal Chemistry (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974). 21 Frank G. Young, ‘Claude Bernard and the discovery of glycogen’, British Medical Journal 5033/1 (1957), 1431–7. 22 Ibid., 1432.

The Metabolism of  Philosophy, in Three Parts

201

and that nutrition is always indirect – arose from experiences of working with excised but living tissue over time. Bernard cut livers from living dogs, washed the livers clean of all blood, demonstrated the absence of detectable sugar with a chemical test, waited, and then later showed the presence of sugar with the same test. Sugar appeared in tissues where there had been none. This ‘vital activity’ was detected when the animal was dead but the tissue was not. With a single liver, washing and waiting could be repeated several times; it was not the death of  the tissue that ended the production of sugar, but the exhaustion of  the substance that the liver was making sugar out of. In 1857 Bernard named it ‘glycogenic matter’, a starch-like substance whose existence proved the creative powers of animal tissues. These creative powers were in turn part of  Bernard’s famous elaboration of animals having and continuously making for themselves an internal environment, a milieu intérieur always being adjusted in relation to an external environment. This created a stability and continuity that enabled an independent life from the f luctuations of  temperature, light, and food of  the outside. The broader context for this work was what historian F.L. Holmes has described as the confrontation of physiology and chemistry on questions of animal respiration, digestion and nutrition.23 Antoine Lavoisier’s theory that combustion of carbon and hydrogen to carbonic acid and water was the source of animal heat, was both contested and experimentally recalcitrant, as were questions about the chemical processes that go on inside animals between eating and excretion.24 It was the time in which food was being redefined in terms of its chemical constitution, the time of  the naming of  the classes of molecules that made up food as carbohydrates, fats and proteins.25 In France, the chemist Jean-Baptiste Dumas together

23 Holmes, Claude Bernard. 24 Everett Mendelsohn, Heat and Life: The Development of  the Theory of  Animal Heat (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1964). Frederic Lawrence Holmes, Lavoisier and the Chemistry of  Life (Madison: Wisconsin University Press, 1987), 2. 25 Harmke Kamminga and Andrew Cunningham, eds, The Science and Culture of  Nutrition, 1840–1940 (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1995).

202

Hannah Landecker

with the agronomist Jean-Baptiste Boussingault generated an inf luential model of  life on earth as a general system of exchanges. Dumas argued that because animals do not create organic materials but only destroy what plants provide for them, one could see the vegetable kingdom as ‘an immense reduction apparatus’, and animals as, ‘from the chemical point of view, combustion apparatuses.’26 Dumas saw ‘an eternally ef ficient world’, in which ‘air became plants, plants became animals, and animals rendered organic building blocks to the air.’27 Several decades later, in Bernard’s 1878 Lectures on the Phenomena of  Life Common to Animals and Plants, the work on glycogen had coalesced into the cornerstone of a philosophy of  life, one articulated in direct opposition to the ‘dualist’ framework of plants generating energy and animals consuming it.28 Experimental work in the animal body showed instead, Bernard argued, that simultaneous creation and destruction are fundamental to all life, a paradoxical mode of  life shared across plants and animals. In fact, life is death, he repeatedly wrote. It was a fundamental argument about kinds: ‘Life is always complete; in the plant as well as in the animal. Neither one represents a half-life.’29 In the 1878 Lectures, Bernard argues that the attempt to define life is a sterile ef fort, but it is perfectly possible to characterize the life that is complete in each animal and plant. Nutrition he singled out from the other characteristics as being ‘the most constant and the most universal of [life’s] manifestations, and the one which in consequence ought and could (by itself ) suf fice to characterize life.’30 He wrote of nutrition, it is

26 Quoted in Holmes, Claude Bernard, 24. 27 Dana Simmons, ‘Waste Not Want Not: Excrement and Economy in Nineteenth Century France’, Representations 96/1 (2006), 73–98, 83. 28 This framework was caricaturized by Bernard as ‘the identification of  the animal organism with an apparatus in which the active forces are engendered with a furnace into which the plant kingdom comes to be engulfed and burned.’ Bernard, Lectures, 101. 29 Ibid., 110. 30 Ibid., 26.

The Metabolism of  Philosophy, in Three Parts

203

the continuous mutation of  the particles which constitute the living being. The organic edifice is the site of a perpetual nutritive movement which leaves no part at rest; each one, without cease or respite, takes its food from the medium that surrounds it and into it rejects its wastes and its products. This molecular renovation is imperceptible to the sight, but as we see its beginning and its end, the intake and output of substances, we conceive of its intermediate phases, and we represent to ourselves a f low of material which passes incessantly through the organism and renovates it in its substance and maintains it in its form. The universality of such a phenomenon in the plant, in the animal, and in all their parts, and its constancy which suf fers no interruption, make it a general sign of  life.31

Nutrition as perpetual movement was not particular to Bernard, and finds articulation in other physiologists quoted by him such as Cuvier, who described the living being ‘as a whirlpool constantly turning in the same direction, in which matter is less essential than form.’32 What was particular to Bernard was the idea that this constant movement and action was the in the service of indirect nutrition. Food is not converted directly into body and heat, but organisms of all kinds can and must maintain nutritive reserves. To have a reserve means, by definition, that the chemical reaction transforming input to output can not be instantaneous, and suggests the intermediate form – remember the lapse of days between looking for sugar and looking for sugar again in the excised liver. As elsewhere in the text, the concept is articulated in opposition to the idea that ‘food passes directly from plants into animals’, as held by the dualists. Rather, nutrition is indirect. The food first disappears, as a definite chemical material, and it is only after extensive organic work, after a complex vital elaboration, that the food comes to constitute the reserves, always identical, that serve for the nutrition of  the organism. Nutrition and digestion are completely separate … In a word, the body never nourishes itself directly from the various foods, but always by means of identical reserves, prepared by a sort of work of secretion.33

31 32 33

Ibid., 26. Ibid., 26. Ibid., 103.

204

Hannah Landecker

In another word, food ceases to be itself. It disappears. It goes through a vital elaboration. Even if  the food has fats in it, Bernard observed, the animal ‘creates fat instead of  finding it fully formed.’ The dog, for instance, ‘does not get fat on mutton fat, it makes dog fat.’34 The nutritive reserve was one of the conditions for ‘free life’ in Bernard’s view. Constant or free life ‘belongs to the most highly organized animals.’ Because constant life rolls along ‘apparently indif ferent to the variations in the cosmic environment’, it must create for itself a constant ‘f luid internal environment formed by the circulating organic liquid that surrounds and bathes all of  the anatomical elements of  the tissues.’35 The conditions for free life are the regulated presence of water, heat, oxygen, and nutritive reserves. Foodstuf fs vary greatly in kind and availability, and therefore animals must have ‘within themselves mechanisms that derive similar materials from these varied diets and regulate the proportion of  them that must enter the blood.’36 This articulation of  the animal’s ability to turn the environment into itself  through nutrition is constitutive of  the argument that each organism, plant or animal, has the whole of  life within it, and one is not ‘made’ to serve the other: The living organism is made for itself, and it has its own intrinsic laws. It works for itself and not for others. There is nothing in the law of evolution of grass that implies that it should be cropped by a herbivor; nothing in the law of evolution of  the herbivor that indicates that it must be devoured by a carnivor; nothing in the law of growth of cane that announces its sugar must sweeten man’s cof fee. The sugar formed in the beet is not destined, either, to maintain the respiratory combustion of  the animals that feed upon it; it is reserved for consumption by the beet itself in the second year of its growth, when it f lowers and fructifies.37

It was straight anthropomorphism, Bernard thought, to see the world as conveniently arranged with a mineral kingdom that is a general reservoir,

34 Ibid., 104. 35 Ibid., 84. 36 Ibid., 90. 37 Ibid., 107.

The Metabolism of  Philosophy, in Three Parts

205

plants that work for animals, and ‘the entire world is made for man’;38 rather, the universal condition was that in all organisms there lay an organic creation which implied an organic destruction. ‘What is observed in the intimate phenomena of nutrition, deep within our tissues, is manifested in the great cosmic phenomena of nature. Living beings cannot exist except with materials from other beings that have died before them or were destroyed by them.’39 Life is death. This only appears paradoxical: it is not problematic to be composed of dead others, because they have ceased to be themselves in any meaningful way: they ‘disappear as a definite chemical material’ and become the reserves, always identical. Exemplifying the reserve substance, the substance glycogen in all its empirical reality came to stand for the inwardness of all life forms, an inwardness that found its highest form in the complex organism with little restriction by the f luctuations of  the external environment. Nutrition was not just one characteristic among others in the organism, but where one saw most distinctly the basics of vital creation and destruction. Autonomy, ‘free life’, separation of each life form from what it eats and the world was enabled by the constant conversion of  the world into the reserves, and the conduct of  free life was the destruction of  those reserves; being eaten meant having the means of one’s autonomy subsumed into someone else’s freedom – becoming someone else’s reserves. In the specific and intimate phenomena of nutrition could be seen the nature of  living things. It was, as many have noted, an age of  the dialectic, in which Bernard staked out an oscillating position that simultaneously rejected and accepted parts of vitalism and mechanism, idealism and materialism; various commentators since have identified his stance as ‘vital materialism’, ‘physical vitalism’, or ‘organicism’.40 Within these larger social and intellectual 38 Ibid., 106. 39 Ibid., 108. 40 On Bernard and organicism, see Donna Haraway, Crystals, Fabrics, and Fields: Metaphors of  Organicism in Twentieth-Century Developmental Biology (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1976). See also the extended discussion of  the historiography of  Bernard’s relation to vitalism in Sebastian Normandin, ‘Claude Bernard and An Introduction to the Study of  Experimental Medicine: “Physical Vitalism”,

206

Hannah Landecker

struggles over the relative place and respective roles of philosophy and science, the answer to the problem of  two things – whether it was the problem of  the plant and the animal, the outside and the inside – was their incorporation into a third empirical entity with its own distinct properties. Much has been made of  Bernard’s formulation of  the milieu intérieur in terms of  his philosophical outlook and his further impact, but in many ways, this was at base a philosophy of glycogen, a form of matter specific to living things. This in-between substance and process simultaneously allowed each organism to look into itself, to live in and from itself, and to simultaneously share, from the lowliest tardigrade to the sessile plant to the complex animal, a ‘common’ phenomenon of  life. The nutritive reserve, always identical, freed the animal, and the thinker, from the binary.

III.  Rudolf  Schoenheimer and the dynamic state The perceptive reader may at this point have noticed that Claude Bernard did not use the word metabolism in any of  the passages quoted above. Instead, he used the terms nutrition, secretion, creation, and destruction. This apparent bump in the present analysis is revealing. Bernard was actively setting himself apart from both his French contemporaries, and the German chemists and physiologists who were championing their own understanding of  Stof fwechsel – literally ‘the change of matter’ – as it went through the eating body. The physiological study of  the total sum of exchanges between the organism and the environment – der gesamte Stof fwechsel in German and ‘total metabolism’ in English – began with chemist Justus Liebig, and was after 1850 firmly established with its own elaborate set

Dialectic and Epistemology’, Journal of  the History of  Medicine and Allied Sciences 62 (2007), 495–528.

The Metabolism of  Philosophy, in Three Parts

207

of  technologies of measurement.41 Descriptions abound of room-sized instruments built to measure every exhalation and exudation of animals and humans, built to demonstrate ‘the regularity of chemical processes within animals when the investigator was able to establish controlled experimental conditions.’42 The great triumph of  this work was the demonstration that the Stof fwechsel occurring in animal bodies was ‘lawlike’ – as long as the experiment hoping to fathom the lawlike process was designed properly. Bernard commented that such experiments were like trying to say what was going on inside a house by observing what went in the door and what came out the chimney.43 Bernard was thus articulating nutrition explicitly against this growing edifice of research in intake-output physiology, and the likes of physiologist Jacob Moleschott, an enthusiast for the idea of  the great cycle of  life, in which plants drew on the mineral kingdom to feed the animal kingdom, and animals excreted and decomposed into the earth to complete the cycle.44 This cycle was elaborated in particular in Moleschott’s books Der Kreislauf des Lebens (1852), and Lehre der Nahrungsmittel. Für das Volk (1850); he participated actively in the politics of scientific materialism – and was the target of accusation of  ‘vulgar’ materialism – these writings had strong inf luence on Ludwig Feuerbach and Karl Marx, as well as Friedrich Nietzsche. Feuerbach in particular was apparently very taken with Moleschott’s formulation Der Mensch ist, was er ißt (which only crudely translates into man is what he eats, since it skips over the intensity in the original German of  the overlap of  being and eating).45

41 Frederic Lawrence Holmes, Between Biology and Medicine: The Formation of  Intermediary Metabolism (Berkeley Papers in History of  Science 14, University of  California, 1992). 42 Frederic Lawrence Holmes, ‘The Intake-Output Method,’ 268. 43 Karl Guggenheim, ‘Rudolf  Schoenheimer and the Concept of  the Dynamic State of  Body Constituents’, Journal of  Nutrition 121(1991), 1701–4. 44 Harmke Kamminga, ‘Nutrition for the People, or the Fate of  Jacob Moleschott’s Contest for a Humanist Science’, Clio Medica 32 (1995), 15–47. 45 Richard Brown, ‘Nietzsche: “That Profound Physiologist”’, in Gregory Moore and Thomas H. Brobjer eds, Nietzsche and Science (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), 51–70.

208

Hannah Landecker

This separation between nutrition and metabolism – the one supposing a specifically vital time and space, the other possessing the instantaneity of a chemical combustion – would persist into the twentieth century. For example, John Burdon Sanderson Haldane confessed in 1922 to biochemist Frederick Gowland Hopkins, whose biochemistry laboratory he was about to join, that he thought of physiological questions ‘primarily in terms of  “milieu intérieur” rather than metabolism, thanks to [my father] and Claude Bernard, and this enables one to see problems which from the point of view of method are much simpler than many metabolic ones.’46 Thus even in 1922, metabolism and Bernard’s nutritive reserve could be seen as separate concepts. As is often the case, the ironies and amalgamations of  history led to superimposition, leaving us today with a concept of metabolism that reveals combined aspects of positions that appeared to contradict one another in an earlier period. The possibility of such superimposition arose in part due to technical developments in the ability to watch what happened to matter in between eating and excretion, rather than just measure it on the way in and the way out. Bernard was the methodologist of  the biology of  the in-between, and as such he appealed to what Donna Haraway has characterized as a strong organicist tradition in Britain in these years, held by many biochemists with socialist or Marxist leanings, such as Haldane and Joseph Needham.47 Bernard was an iconic figure for biochemists in the 1920s and 1930s, particularly in Britain, as they struggled to fulfil Hopkins’s optimistic pronouncement in 1913 of  the promise of a ‘dynamic biochemistry’, that would ‘ultimately be able to follow, on definite chemical lines, the fate in metabolism of each amino-acid individually; to trace each phase in the series of reactions which are concerned in the gradual breakdown and oxidation of its molecule.’48 The promise of  the intermediary was compelling, but its 46 J.B.S. Haldane, in a letter to Frederick Gowland Hopkins, 23 May 1922, quoted in Sahotra Sarkar, ‘Science, Philosophy, and Politics in the Work of  J.B.S. Haldane, 1922–1937’, Biology and Philosophy 7 (1992), 385–409: 389. 47 Haraway, Crystals, Fabrics and Fields. 48 Frederick Gowland Hopkins, ‘The Dynamic Side of  Biochemistry’, Nature 92 (1913), 213–23: 213.

The Metabolism of  Philosophy, in Three Parts

209

technical detail was daunting. The Harvard physiologist L.J. Henderson is reported to have said, ‘the body seems to contain what may be likened to marshes or swamps into which substances may disappear and be lost to view.’49 While physicists laid claim to metabolism as a problem of  thermodynamics – Erwin Schrödinger, for example, declared in What is Life? that organisms stay alive by eating negative entropy – organicist life scientists such as Joseph Needham claimed that biological organization could not be merged without dif ference into a physicist’s definition of order.50 Physicists tended to think that the problems of  biology disappear once one realizes that both organism and environment are ‘resolved into swarms of particles in which – here and there – are momentary condensations.’51 For Needham the point was exactly that organisms were set of f, by metabolism, from the universe at large: the matter of which they were composed, and which metabolism was constantly composing, was found nowhere in the universe but inside the body: ‘I was always deeply impressed by a fact so obvious that it never seemed to have occurred to many biological philosophers, namely, that proteins, carbohydrates and fats are never found in colloidal combination or even alone anywhere outside living organisms.’52 The embryologist pushed back against the reigning debates in thermodynamics with the specificity and dynamism of metabolic matter. And here we turn to a thoroughgoing material and temporal demonstration of constant molecular regeneration produced in the 1930s, which provided the ground for the superimposition of  Bernard’s ‘perpetual nutritive movement’ and the process-thing that was coming to be elaborated as ‘intermediary metabolism’. Previous workers had certainly articulated the 49 Joseph Barcroft, Features in the Architecture of  Physiological Function (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1934), 90. 50 Erwin Schrödinger, What is Life? The Physical Aspect of  the Living Cell; With Mind and Matter; & Autobiographical Sketches (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). 51 J.H. Woodger, Biological Principles, 1929, 331. 52 Joseph Needham, Time’s Refreshing River: Essays and Addresses 1932–1942 (London: Allan & Unwin, 1943), 229.

210

Hannah Landecker

idea of metabolic dynamism – as Scott Gilbert has argued, the dominant image of  the persistence of  life over time for the discipline of  biochemistry was the whirlpool, constantly moving, while that of genetics was the crystal – a static structure whose form held the possibility of repetition.53 One finds repeated allusions to ‘dynamic biochemistry’ and ‘chemical dynamics of  life phenomena’ in the 1910s and 1920s, but these remained rather theoretical statements rather than direct demonstrations.54 In the 1930s the ‘swamp’ of  the body began to be navigated with the isotope. That is, dif ferent ‘versions’ of  the same element such as hydrogen or carbon, dif fer in numbers of neutrons and thus molecular weight. ‘Heavy water’ as it is popularly known, is made using ‘heavy hydrogen’ or deuterium – water or fats or anything containing hydrogen can be ‘labelled’ by building it with this unusually heavy version. Rudolf  Schoenheimer, one of  the many German-Jewish scientists who moved to the United States in the 1930s, arrived at Columbia University already deeply engaged in attempting to follow cholesterol metabolism in the body, and was quickly drawn into the project of  finding experimental applications in the life sciences for these new isotopes. Schoenheimer, who died in 1941, wrote in his posthumously published Dunham Lectures that, The new results suggest that all constituents of  living matter, whether functional or structural, of simple or of complex constitution, are in a steady state of rapid f lux. The finding of  the rapid molecular regeneration, involving constant transfer of specific groups, suggests that the biological system represents one great cycle of closely linked chemical reactions.55

The significance of  The Dynamic State of  Body Constituents was clear to its contemporary readers. It broke several boundaries, including the assumption that there was an endogenous and an exogenous metabolism, one concerned with repairing the wear and tear to tissues, one with the generation 53

Scott Gilbert, ‘Intellectual Traditions in the Life Sciences: Molecular Biology and Biochemistry’, Perspectives in Biology and Medicine 26 (1982), 151–62. 54 For example, Otto Meyerhof, Chemical Dynamics of  Life Phaenomena (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1924). 55 Schoenheimer, Dynamic State, 65.

The Metabolism of  Philosophy, in Three Parts

211

of energy. The intense dynamism of  the body tissues themselves came as a surprise, as body proteins were assumed to be metabolically inert. The observations confused structure and function, since the structures were in constant f lux, making the function they supposedly were executing hard to separate from the structural changes. In 1944, the medical historian Erwin Ackernecht wrote that after Schoenheimer’s experiments, the science of metabolism was on the brink of momentous change, exiting the ‘quantitative study’ of  Liebig and Rubner, and re-entering a period of  ‘qualitative’ observation again; by qualitative observation he meant watching the molecules of intermediary metabolism, a visibility enabled by molecular tracers.56 As were many others, Ackernecht was obviously deeply moved by The Dynamic State of  Body Constituents, for he also was ready to echo Schoenheimer’s language and declare the demise of over a hundred years of  the ‘old symbols’ of  the ‘candle’ and the ‘combustion engine’.57 How could one talk of  the body as a combustion engine when ‘there is no fundamental dif ference between construction and combustion material’, when the machine itself was constantly being transformed just as the ‘fuel’ was? The rise of  tracing experiments, whose surprising outcome was to see that the molecules ‘performing’ metabolism were as dynamically transformed as the molecules being metabolized – seemed to indicate a decisive break, such that Ackernecht could see it as a form of  ‘qualitative’ biochemistry, a molecular appreciation of vitality. Schoenheimer was fond of poking fun at the so-called ‘input-output’ experiments of  biochemistry and physiology, much as Bernard had been. It was, Schoenheimer said, like putting a copper penny in a gum machine, receiving gum at the other end, and concluding therefore that copper turned into gum. By contrast, using isotopes, even when the substance it 56 57

Erwin Ackernecht, ‘Metabolism from Liebig to the present’, Ciba Symposia 6 (1944), 1825–33. By 1949, Schoenheimer’s posthumously published Dunham Lectures were already in their third printing (it was reprinted a final time in 1964). This was not a ‘popular’ book – it was a dense work of  biochemistry laying out Schoenheimer’s findings using isotopes.

212

Hannah Landecker

is originally a part of is broken apart, the fate of a hydrogen, carbon, or nitrogen molecule could be followed. In the face of  the challenge akin to tracing ‘the fate of a drop of water added to a glass of water’, using these isotopes as markers allowed the investigator to tell which carbon atom or which hydrogen atom came from where, and was incorporated into what, thus opening up the ability to trace with great precision the chemical interconversions involved in cellular processes.58 And what did one see in these tracings? Schoenheimer saw, with these tracers, an image of incessant conversion: ‘Ester, peptide, and other linkages open; the fragments liberated thereby merge with those derived from other large molecules, and with those absorbed from the intestinal tract, to form a metabolic pool of components indistinguishable as to origin.’59 Instead of seeing an inevitable one-way course of  food to waste, with a reaction in the middle that liberated energy, he saw food molecules and body molecules all changing at once. As Angela Creager has written of  the later application of radioisotopes as molecular tracers, it created a whole new arena of possibility for seeing molecular life in time.60 This general conclusion of a biological system that is ‘one great cycle’ of  linked chemical reactions, was based on several years of intense experimentation with following specific molecules from food into the body. One of  the surprises noted by Schoenheimer and commentators on his work was the resolutely indirect course travelled by molecules between food and energy or food and waste. Schoenheimer, in some of  his first uses of  foodstuf fs made with heavy hydrogen, fed mice deuterated linseed oil (in which the normal hydrogen molecules in the oil were replaced with the heavier isotope), and was surprised to find that the fat was not immediately turned to energy in the body, but converted into body fat:

58 Quoted in Kohler, ‘Rudolf  Schoenheimer’, 295. 59 Schoenheimer, Dynamic State, 62. 60 Angela N.H. Creager and Hannah Landecker, ‘Technical Matters: Method, Knowledge, and Infrastructure in Twentieth-Century Life Science’, Nature Methods 6 (2009), 701–5.

The Metabolism of  Philosophy, in Three Parts

213

We expected that … almost all of  the ingested fat would be burned and that relatively little would be deposited. Much to our surprise we found that in spite of  the fact that the animals had lost weight, a large proportion of  the absorbed fat was deposited in the depots, indicating that the fat which was burned was not oxidized directly after absorption but had been taken from the fat deposits.61

As historian Robert Kohler notes, ‘since it was known that the composition of  body fat remained the same whatever fats were ingested, the rapid replacement of  the body fat by deuterated linseed oil seemed to imply a rapid chemical transformation of  foreign to body fatty acids.’62 In other words, the ingested fat was not directly used, but converted into fatty acid molecules that themselves cycled through metabolism in various ways. Schoenheimer’s work resulted in the emergence of  the idea of a kind of inner ‘pool’ in and from which constant metabolic ‘regeneration’ was occurring. Similar findings were made with nitrogen, showing not only the ‘storage’ of molecules from food, but the constant exchange and interchange between molecules originally derived from food and the molecules of  body tissues. Tissue proteins had up until then been assumed to be metabolically inert, but here they were as changeable as the food proteins. One commentator wrote, in eulogizing Schoenheimer and trying to sum up the significance of  his work: the central idea is the continual release and uptake of chemical substances by tissues to and from a circulating metabolic ‘pool.’ Coincident with these cyclic processes there occur among the components of  the pool multitudinous chemical reactions, of which only relatively few are concerned with elimination of waste products.63

Thus surprisingly little of  the isotope fed to the animals was immediately excreted, but had a ‘life’ within the metabolic pool for an extended period of  time, moving in and out of and between tissues. Here we see the empirical

61

Rudolf  Schoenheimer and David Rittenberg, ‘Deuterium as an Indicator in the Study of  Intermediary Metabolism III. The Role of  the Fat Tissues’, Journal of  Biological Chemistry 111 (1935), 175–81: 175. 62 Kohler, ‘Rudolf  Schoenheimer’, 278. 63 Hans T. Clarke, ‘Rudolf  Schoenheimer, 1898–1941’, Science 94 (1941), 553.

214

Hannah Landecker

correlate of  the linguistic shift – the metaphor of candle implied an instant conf lagration by which fuel turned to f lame, just as an engine and fuel implied two separate entities, one processed by the other, producing energy and waste. Instead, there was a deep complexity with its own distinctive biochemistry to the in-between. Conversion of  food to bodily matter and energy and waste was not instantaneous, nor direct: there was a space and time to the neither-nor of  food and body. Importantly, Schoenheimer called this a ‘dynamic state’ – very intentionally not a ‘steady state’ or ‘dynamic equilibrium’ as a physical chemist or a physicist might. He noted that the moment he extracted chemical substances from the organism, they could be kept unchanged indefinitely. ‘However, as long as they remain actual constituents of  the living body, they represent links in a chain of continuous reactions in which apparently all organic substances, even those of  the storage material, are involved.’64 The dynamic state was specific to metabolic life.

IV.  Hans Jonas and needful freedom In 1966, Hans Jonas, then a professor of philosophy at the New School for Social Research in New York, published the aforementioned book of essays entitled The Phenomenon of  Life: Toward a Philosophical Biology, proposing a philosophy of  life based on a reading of contemporary biology for its existential dimensions. Jonas is better known for his later work, which lays out an understanding of responsibility in a technological age, and his engagements with early bioethics. However, in this 1966 work, biology and not medicine or technology was at the centre. These ideas began to be formulated as Jonas fought in the Palestinian brigade of  the British Army in World War II, supplied with any book of  life science his wife Lore Jonas

64 Rudolf  Schoenheimer, ‘The Investigation of  Intermediary Metabolism With the Aid of  Heavy Hydrogen’, Bulletin of  the New York Academy of  Medicine 13/5 (1937), 272–95: 294.

The Metabolism of  Philosophy, in Three Parts

215

could lay her hands on in Palestine – ‘Charles Darwin, Aldous Huxley, J.B.S. Haldane, and many others.’65 Jonas is an unexpectedly acute reader of  the mid-twentieth-century biochemistry of intermediary metabolism, given that his previous work was an in-depth study of ancient Gnosticism, completed while a student of  Martin Heidegger. Or maybe not: Heidegger after all had written early in his career on the medieval philosopher Duns Scotus and problems of  haecceity – ‘this-ness’ – and individuation; allied concerns about the perception of continuity and discreteness of  things swirled through phenomenology in the decades before World War II. Perhaps it is exactly because of  this background that Jonas saw in the biochemistry of metabolism a way out of  the apparent enmity between metaphysics and logical positivism, a way to use science not as a positivistic ‘solution’ to philosophical questions, but material from which to develop a metaphysics of matter, specifically living matter. Metabolism, Jonas wrote, is often considered no more than the elementary level underlying higher functions such as perception, locomotion and desire. Rather than mobilize metabolism in the service of consideration of  higher functions – cognition, for example – he opened out the concept of metabolism as he found it described in his contemporary science. He found there a materiality that, in fact contains in its own primary constitution the groundwork as it were of all those functions, which may or may not evolve on its basis. It presages them by enacting within itself  the cardinal polarities which those functions will expand and span with their more determinate relationships: the polarity of  being and not-being, of self and world, or freedom and necessity.66

Things need to eat and drink of other life and of  the world, but they do not thereby lose distinctiveness in the world. Instead, metabolism and its constant dynamic inter-conversions simultaneously bind organisms to the Lore Jonas, ‘Foreword’, in Hans Jonas, Memoirs, ed. Christian Weise, trans. Krishna Winston (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2008). 66 Hans Jonas, Philosophical Essays: From Ancient Creed to Technological Man (Englewood Clif fs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1974), 196. 65

216

Hannah Landecker

environment and free them from it. Its function is not so much as to be a boundary in between organism and environment, but to produce that distinction in the first place – to produce an ‘inwardness’ at the basis of individuation and selfhood, found in humans of course but present in life of all forms from the very beginning. The part of  The Phenomenon of Life that presents the most overt articulation of  Jonas’s understanding and mobilization of metabolism comes at the mid-point of  the book, in an essay titled ‘Is God a Mathematician?’ It was ostensibly an engagement with astronomer-physicist Sir James Jeans’s declaration in The Mysterious Universe (1933) that on the evidence of  the material world, God appears to be a mathematician. He asked what the divine mathematician were to see, if it happened to rest on a living body, an organism: As a physical body, the organism will exhibit the same general features as do other aggregates: a void mostly, criss-crossed by the geometry of  forces that emanate from the insular foci of  localized elementary being. But special goings-on will be discernable, both inside and outside its so-called boundary, which will render its phenomenal unity still more problematical than that of ordinary bodies, and will ef face almost entirely its natural identity through time. I refer to its metabolism, its exchange of matter with the surroundings.67

As Needham and Woodger before him had argued, mathematics and physics had no language of description for the meaning of metabolism, these ‘special goings-on’, Jonas said. Phenomenal unity is the key phrase here, and is that for which metabolism is responsible. Jonas continues: In this remarkable mode of  being, the material parts of which the organism consists at a given instant are to the penetrating observer only temporary, passing contents whose joint material identity does not coincide with the identity of  the whole which they enter and leave, and which sustains its own identity by the very act of  foreign matter passing through its spatial system, the living form. It is never the same materially and yet persists as its same self, by not remaining the same matter.68

67 Jonas, The Phenomenon of  Life, 75–6. 68 Ibid., 76.

The Metabolism of  Philosophy, in Three Parts

217

It is an image of  living things as phenomenal unities whose essence is turnover. On the strength of  the immediate testimony of our own constantly changing, ingesting, but persisting bodies, Jonas wrote, we are able to say what no disembodied onlooker would have a cause for saying: that the mathematical God in his homogenous analytical view misses the decisive point – the point of  life itself: its being self-centered individuality, being for itself and in contraposition to all the rest of  the world, with an essential boundary dividing ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ – notwithstanding, nay, on the very basis of  the actual exchange.69

Metabolism, in this analysis, was not a boundary between two things, but a dynamic production of  there being two things at all: without metabolism, there would be no need to have inside and outside, organism and environment, animal and world. In other words, there are not two entities which then enter into exchange with one another, requiring a boundary to keep them distinct, but a third thing – a metabolism – which produce the two-ness of organism and environment. Furthermore, only metabolizing observers – i.e. philosophers with metabolisms – can experience this open inwardness, thus excluding the hypothetical Mathematician God, In this schema, ‘organic form stands in a dialectal relation of needful freedom to matter’, because, literally, the organism needs to eat. The capacity to metabolize was a ‘can’ and simultaneously a ‘must’, for ‘it can, but it cannot cease to do what it can without ceasing to be’.70 Metabolism is the most elementary form of  the antinomy of  freedom at the roots of  life, ‘its liberty itself is its peculiar necessity’. Further, metabolism constitutes the organization of organisms for ‘inwardness, for internal identity, for individuality’, but it simultaneously turns the organism outward, ‘toward the world in a peculiar relatedness of dependence and possibility. Its want goes out to where its means of satisfaction lie: its self-concern, active in the acquisition of new matter, is essential openness for the encounter of outer being.’71 For Jonas, the facts of metabolism were no less than the basis of

69 Ibid. 79. 70 Ibid., 83. 71 Ibid., 84.

218

Hannah Landecker

selfhood and the world, ‘and in this polarity of self and world, of internal and external’, was a ‘germinal freedom’ that a philosophical biology could follow through the ascending levels of organic evolution, into the human. It was a viewpoint only accessible to the embodied philosopher possessed of such organic inwardness. The brief account given above of  The Phenomenon of  Life emphasizes two characteristics of  this particular use of metabolism as a defining concept. First, constant change underpins stability. It is not that there is an organism that performs or enacts change, but: ‘We have to realize the all-pervasiveness of metabolism within the living system. The exchange of matter with the environment is not a peripheral activity engaged in by a persistent core: it is the total mode of continuity (self-continuation) of  the subject of  life itself.’72 Persistence and continuity of organic form is dynamic being. Change is the primary condition of remaining alive and the same and there can be no separation of  the agent and the subject of change. Second, metabolism is a very particular kind of  boundary. From it arises individuation, an inwardness, and the possibility of selfhood. This is the ‘existential’ interpretation of  ‘biological facts’ – the ‘new reading of  the biological record [to] recover the inner dimension’ – that Jonas promises at the opening of  his book.73 What then are the biological facts at the heart of  this interpretation? The image of metabolism given here directly evokes two other figures: the biologist Ludwig von Bertalanf f y and Rudolf  Schoenheimer, discussed above. Von Bertalanf f y, a biologist and theorist well known as a founder of general systems theory, crossed paths with Jonas in Canada. In 1949, Jonas was funded by the Lady Davis Foundation, dedicated to bringing refugee scientists and scholars to Canada, to come to Montreal for a year. In attempting to find an academic appointment in philosophy in Canada, Jonas wrote to Bertalanf f y, whom he had never met but was funded by the same foundation. Roberto Franzini Tibaldeo writes that these initial letters went quickly from a formal introduction and request for aid from a fellow refugee scholar to an intense

72 Ibid. footnote 13, 76. 73 Ibid., xxiii.

The Metabolism of  Philosophy, in Three Parts

219

intellectual engagement that involved Jonas sending Bertalanf f y an early draft of  his essay, ‘Is God a Mathematician?’ and then a copy of  his book, Gnosis und spätantiker Geist. In response, Bertalanf f y suggested contacts in Ottawa which led to Jonas moving to Carleton College, and that Jonas write a book on the ‘parallels between the Gnostic era and ours’.74 In his memoirs, Jonas reports that he and Bertalanf f y formed a ‘real intellectual friendship’, in which they exchanged ‘significant ideas on nature, the essence of  biological systems, and living organisms’ mode of existence.’75 Apparently there was no one else in Ottawa with whom Jonas felt comfortable having a real philosophical exchange. Moreover, in the course of  the war, without recourse to libraries or the materials for his previous work on Gnostic religion, he had turned toward thinking about life under the threat of its constant loss. Bertalanf f y for his part was at this time further developing ideas of  the organism as an open system ‘which continually gives up matter to the outer world and takes in matter from it, but which maintains itself in this continuous exchange in a steady state.’76 It was not just a matter of simple exchange between inner and outer, but of  the persistence of  the organism itself  being the ‘manifestation of a perpetual f low’: Living forms are not in being, they are happening; they are the expression of a perpetual stream of matter and energy which passes through the organism and at the same time constitutes it. We believe we remain the same being; in truth hardly anything is left of  the material components of our body in a few years; new chemical compounds, new cells and tissues have replaced the present ones […] In the cell a continuous destruction of  the chemical compounds composing it is taking place, in which destruction it persists as a whole.77

74 Letter from Bertalanf f y to Jonas, 1 April 1950, quoted in Roberto Franzini Tibaldeo, ‘Hans Jonas’ “Gnosticism and Modern Nihilism” and Ludwig von Bertalanf f y,’ Philosophy & Social Criticism 38 (2012), 289–311. 75 Hans Jonas, Memoirs, 159. 76 Ludwig von Bertalanf f y, Problems of  Life: An Evaluation of Modern Biological Thought (London: Wiley and Sons, 1952), 125. 77 Ibid., 124. Emphasis in original.

220

Hannah Landecker

In the writing of  both Bertalanf f y and Jonas, there is considerable ef fort to emphasize that cells or the bodies are the f low: ‘not in being, they are happening’. In fact, the appeal of contemporary metabolic science for these authors seems to be its break with classic metaphors of  the candle or the engine, allowing rejection of  the body as machine without thereby having to also give up either mechanism or materialism with it. Jonas, for example, noted that, when we call a living body a ‘metabolizing system’, we must include in the term that the system itself is wholly and continuously a result of its metabolizing activity, and further that none of  the ‘result’ ceases to be an object of metabolism while it is also an agent of it. For this reason alone, it is inappropriate to liken the organism to a machine … Metabolism thus is the constant becoming of  the machine itself – and this becoming itself is a performance of  the machine: but for such performance there is no analogue in the world of machines.78

This passage in particular has strong resonance with Schoenheimer’s words: ‘The simile of  the combustion engine pictured the steady f low of  fuel into a fixed system, and the conversion of  this fuel into waste products. The new results imply that not only the fuel, but the structural materials are in a steady state of  f lux.’79 Schoenheimer’s work is liberally referenced throughout Ludwig von Bertalanf f y’s empirical and theoretical papers of  the 1940s and 1950s. Bertalanf f y’s empirical work at this time was centrally concerned with the relations between metabolism and growth.80 The elaboration of  ‘growth types’ and ‘metabolic types’ as a mode of categorizing organisms, and the relations between them, was one of  his demonstration points for the worth of  ‘systems theory’ applied to empirical and experimental biology. Moreover, the ‘steady state of rapid f lux’ identified by Schoenheimer is important in the theoretical elaboration of  the organism as an open system, 78 Jonas, Phenomenon of  Life, 76. 79 Schoenheimer, Dynamic State, quotation 65. 80 See, for example, Ludwig von Bertalanf f y, ‘Problems of  Organic Growth’, Nature 163 (1949), 156–8; Ludwig von Bertalanf f y, ‘Quantitative Laws in Metabolism and Growth’, The Quarterly Review of  Biology 32/3 (1958), 217–31.

The Metabolism of  Philosophy, in Three Parts

221

and Bertalanf f y explicitly recognized that it was Schoenheimer who noted that the long-known phenomenon of cell turnover was matched or perhaps exceeded by constant chemical reconstitution of  the cell itself. Typical to Bertalanf f y’s style, Schoenheimer was singled out for recognition because the work with isotopes had conveniently empirically demonstrated what Bertlanf f y had asserted theoretically under the banner of  ‘dynamic morphology’ years before: In fact, we have inferred, from quantitative analysis and theory of growth, and before the investigations of  Schoenheimer and his co-workers, just the essential conclusions reached by the tracer method, namely, 1) that protein metabolism goes on, particularly in mammals, at much higher rates than classical physiology supposed, and 2) that there is synthesis and resynthesis of amino acids and proteins from ammonia and nitrogen-free chains. These predictions were rather hazardous at that time; but they have been fully confirmed by later isotope work.81

The matter of whether Jonas directly interacted with Schoenheimer’s writings, or only through the intermediary figure of  Bertalanf f y, is of  little consequence. In reading The Phenomenon of  Life and The Dynamic State of  Body Constituents together one cannot but note a profound resonance between these respective works, however they are connected. The manifest joy in Phenomenon of  Life at the paradox of permanent change in order to persist, at the finding of  the dialectic in the very constitution of  living matter – one which held things open to the future – is the joy of a distinctly metabolic metaphysics, grounded in a calm certainty that vital matter is in a state of constant f lux such that interchange with the outside is a turnover of self at the same time. The ‘fact’ that the body constituents change as much as the food constituents, and that this change is ceaseless as long as there is life, is identifiable as the specific metabolism of  Jonas’s philosophy.

81

Ludwig von Bertalanf f y, ‘The Theory of  Open Systems in Physics and Biology,’ Science 111 (1950), 23–9. In this passage, Bertalanf f y cites a number of  his own previous publications to shore up the assertion that Schoenheimer merely demonstrated the truth of what he had thought of much earlier.

222

Hannah Landecker

V. Conclusion Hannah Arendt commented at length on Karl Marx’s sense that he was ‘speaking physiologically’, and not metaphorically, when he spoke of  labour as the metabolism between man and nature.82 Across the nineteenth century theories of economics, history, biology and geology formulated to address change and growth, process became a key term, Arendt argued. And this process, ‘because of its apparent endlessness, was understood as a natural process and more specifically in the image of  the life process itself.’83 She elaborates: What all these theories in the various sciences […] have in common is the concept of process, which was virtually unknown prior to the modern age. Since the discovery of processes by the natural sciences had coincided with the discovery of introspection in philosophy, it is only natural that the biological process within ourselves should eventually become the very model of  the new concept; within the framework of experiences given to introspection, we know of no other process but the life process within our bodies.84

This diagnosis is a good one: Marx was extremely fond of metabolism, because it gave a properly material sense to exchange, the biological process providing the ‘very model’ of  the concept of  labour.85 The particular outcome – for political theory in this instance – depended on the specificity of which ‘biological process within ourselves’ provided the model, and in Marx’s case it was the German tradition of  total metabolism, which saw 82 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of  Chicago Press, 1958), 98–9: ‘When Marx defined labor as “man’s metabolism with nature” in whose process “nature’s material [is] adapted by a change of  form to the want of man”, so that “labor has incorporated itself with its subject”, he indicated clearly that he was “speaking physiologically” and that labor and consumption are but two stages of  the ever-recurring cycle of  biological life.’ 83 Ibid., 105. 84 Ibid., 116. 85 Alfred Schmidt, The Concept of  Nature in Marx, trans. Ben Fowkes (London: NLB, 1971).

The Metabolism of  Philosophy, in Three Parts

223

the body as a site of combustion and exchange, where what mattered was the generation of energy for labour power in the service of more life and more capital – and not a Bernardian notion of nutrition, in the service of  free life.86 In the twentieth century, the nutritive reserve and the compelling biology of  the in-between enabled by isotope tracing became folded together in the quest for a ‘dynamic biochemistry’. Hannah Arendt, Hans Jonas’s close friend and colleague, could as well have been speaking of  Jonas as of  Marx when she spoke of  the ‘biological process within ourselves’ becoming the ‘very model’ of  the new concept of process, except that the quality of  that biological science had changed profoundly since the time of Marx and Moleschott. This is not to say that Jonas’s philosophy was derivative. The very fact that mid-twentieth-century biochemistry of metabolism could seem an appropriate object of introspection, a resource for philosophy, speaks to the enduring usefulness – in various historically specific configurations – of metabolism as a third thing. It has been, and is, a concept with which to move across and beyond – or simply hold in permanent oscillation – polarities of all kinds. The connections drawn here are not meant as a story of intellectual genealogies (Bernard inf luences Schoenheimer inf luences Bertalanf f y inf luences Jonas), so much as a way of  tracing out the mirroring of science and philosophy over the twentieth century, of  the empirical and the existential. The metabolism of  the nineteenth and twentieth centuries traced here is a very particular concept, and remarkably inward looking – for all the dynamism of metabolic process, it allows freedom from the world. It proposes a very bounded individual, in fact, individuated life as boundary. This boundary is not at the surface of  bodies, but deep inside them, located in the reserve, or the pool, in the space and time that is not quite the organism nor quite the environment, but the moving zone in which the two become one. Perhaps like other cartographies, the making of metabolic maps of  the great interconnected cycle of chemical reactions

86 Anson Rabinbach, The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue, and the Origins of  Modernity (Berkeley: University of  California Press, 1992).

224

Hannah Landecker

has lent a sense of unwarranted coherence to metabolism as a ‘thing’ in the body, rather than a mobile construct of  human knowledge. This analysis, in restoring some measure of  historicity to metabolism, has sought to set it in motion again.

Jeannie Moser

The Biography of a Psychotropic Substance: Epistemic Figures of  the Third in LSD – My Problem Child by Albert Hofmann

Psychotropic substances evoke extraordinary experiences, they alter consciousness and shift perception, they af fect moods, they modify cognition, and they restructure all these processes in a radical way. When, in 1943, the Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann performed his experiments in a pharmaceutical laboratory belonging to Sandoz Company in Basel, he did not discover the circulatory and respiratory stimulant he was looking for, but instead precisely such a psychotropic substance; a substance which later became known as LSD. Because of  the spectacular material changeability of mental processes, LSD became an object of research that far exceeded Hofmann’s original intention and, as a consequence, was pursued by him for the rest of  his life. After his first – involuntary – contact with the psychoactive ef fects of  this drug, several further experiments and an intensive inquiry followed within a hybrid research field: he exchanged ideas with pharmacologists, psychiatrists, neurologists, ethnologists, as well as philosophers and writers, the best-known among them being probably Ernst Jünger. All of  them were fascinated by the astonishing ef fects of  LSD on human perception and consciousness. In 1975, Hofmann reviewed both his professional career and the development of  the substance in the book LSD – My Problem Child: Ref lections on Sacred Drugs, Mysticism, and Science (LSD – Mein Sorgenkind. Die Entdeckung einer ‘Wunderdroge’  ).

226

Jeannie Moser

Building on Lorraine Daston’s idea that scientific objects come into being and have their own histories, in the sense of  biographies,1 I will show, in a close reading, how Hofmann relates such a biography of  LSD, availing himself of  techniques of  literary text-production, for example narrative and rhetorical figuration. In order to explore how figurative operations are essential for the production of epistemic meaning and even for the genesis of scientific knowledge, I draw upon concepts of  literary theory, as well as cultural and science studies. As a scientific object, LSD turns out to be a hybrid that is both a natural substance and a discursive phenomenon. Concentrating on the opening chapters, I will then spotlight how the biography of  LSD is inextricably linked to an autobiographical narrative that details the researcher Hofmann himself. The fusion of narratives is inevitable on account of  the fact that in auto-experiments with psychotropic substances investigator and test subject converge, or in the terms familiar to philosophers, subject and object merge forming a third agent. This third agent disarranges the conventional positions of  the researcher and his subject in the experimental setting. It means the challenging, sometimes even abandoning of  habitualized practices of scientific writing, epistemic stabilization or legitimation. This third agent spawns new ones. And, related to the confusion of the order of  knowledge, it calls the distinction between ‘the two cultures’ into question.2 Since the object of research multiplies and can potentially include all inebriated humans, and since it cannot be generalized and turned into objective data, scientific credibility has to issue from the subject. In LSD – My Problem Child this subject, more precisely the scientist himself as an identifiable person, is prominently profiled; scientific texts usually render the author neutral, invisible, and anonymous in order to corroborate the scientific claim to being disinterested and not subjectively biased or, in other words, the claim to being the voice of nature’s truth. 1 2

Cf. Lorraine Daston: ‘Introduction: The Coming into Being of  Scientific Objects’, in idem, ed., Biographies of  Scientific Objects (Chicago: University of  Chicago Press, 2000), 1–14. For the thesis of an irrevocable split of  humanities and sciences see Charles Percy Snow, The Two Cultures (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993 [1959]).

The Biography of a Psychotropic Substance

227

LSD – My Problem Child consists of  texts, reports, protocols and letters from various sources that Hofmann assembled and commented on. He tells a particular history of  the substance he was working on – given that scientific objects do not remain constant throughout time and dif ferent cultural contexts, but instead are characterized by their mutable historicity, as Daston points out. In the book, Hofmann opens a narrative space that allows the chemical to ‘come into being’ as a concrete scientific object with certain traits and features.3 These traits and features are articulated through linguistic figurations that are highly f lexible. The drug presents itself in various ways, showing up in dif ferent epistemic areas and playing several roles. To begin with, it is called an incalculable and frightening demon, after that it is a successful medicament in psychoanalysis and psychotherapy, an intriguing tool for the CIA’s mind-control practices, a narcotic drug and a synonym for counter cultures, and, some other time, an entheogenic sacred drug. In itself  tasteless, odourless and colourless, LSD appears again and again in dif ferent contexts. The substance takes on dif ferent shapes and forms depending on its environments. The changeability of  figurative appearances in Hofmann’s book is echoed in current studies in history of science which explore the relation between scientific knowledge and representation.4 Epistemic objects initially lack form and meaning, until one is able to provide a description of  their attributes, peculiarities and characteristics. One can approach them only through the many ways in which they are engaged in accounts of what they do.5 So even if  LSD is real and substantial, as an epistemic object it is 3 4

5

Cf. Daston: ‘Introduction: The Coming into Being of  Scientific Objects’. See for the poetic conditions of  knowledge, and for the question of representation and production of  knowledge respectively, e.g.: Nayla Farouki and Michel Serres, eds, Thesaurus der exakten Wissenschaften (Frankfurt/Main: Zweitausendeins, 2004), 147–8; Michael Hagner, Hans-Jörg Rheinberger and Bettina Wahrig, eds, Räume des Wissens. Repräsentation, Codierung, Spur (Berlin: Akademie, 1997), 7–21; Jacques Rancière, Names of  History: On the Poetics of  Knowledge (Minneapolis: University of  Minnesota Press, 1994); Joseph Vogl, ‘Einleitung’, in idem, ed., Poetologien des Wissens um 1800 (Munich: Fink, 1999), 7–16. Cf. Bruno Latour, ‘How to Talk About the Body? The Normative Dimension of  Science Studies’, Body and Society 10/2/3 (2004), 205–29, here 207.

228

Jeannie Moser

neither available, meaningful, nor of a certain pre-established value which is then transmitted into a sign system. Representation is not a process of mimesis or substitution of something characteristic that is already there, but instead a constitutive part of research – a process of performing, shaping, modelling and producing epistemic objects that is linked to the creation and configuration of  terms, categories, signs, definitions, and names. Finally, all the rhetorical and narrative operations add up to the particular biography of a scientific object. In the foreword to LSD – My Problem Child Hofmann remarks: ‘It is my desire in this book to give a comprehensive picture of  LSD, its origins, its ef fects’.6 This comprehensive picture is to be composed by means of several figures. Each of them provides form and materiality, lending conceptual stability to the nebulous object of  Hofmann’s attention. And, finally, each of  them contributes to the project of writing a successful biography of  LSD – a broad history of its origins, its genesis, development and ef fects. And that is what Hofmann is trying to do. In the following, I will focus on figures and narratives Hofmann works with, especially in the first part of  this biography, concerning the emergence, or, in Hofmann’s words, the discovery of  the chemical.

I.  A child and her family background The first figure can be traced in the title. This figure interacts with the cover picture of  the German edition of 2002 (see Figure 1). At first glance, the famous picture shows a chemist with an abstract molecular model of LSD

6

Albert Hofmann, LSD – My Problem Child: Ref lections on Sacred Drugs, Mysticism, and Science, translated by Jonathan Ott (Santa Cruz, CA: MAPS, 2005 [Los Angeles: J.P. Tarcher Inc, 1983]), 32. Excerpts from the English translation LSD: My Problem Child by Albert Hofmann are quoted by permission of  MAPS, Santa Cruz, CA, USA.

The Biography of a Psychotropic Substance

229

Figure 1. Cover of  the German edition of  LSD: My Problem Child. Albert Hofmann, LSD – Mein Sorgenkind. Die Entdeckung einer ‘Wunderdroge’ (Munich: dtv, 2002). ©/courtesy of dtv-Verlag.

in his hands. But the problem child in the title suggests a further interpretation: it could be a proud father holding his (new-born) child. Jacques Derrida has argued that the ef fect of  tropes and figures is to put into relation. Terms and their notions start to transfer meaning, with meaning itself 

230

Jeannie Moser

being generated by the process of  transfer.7 When Hofmann refers to LSD as his problem child, the metaphorical transformation not only af fects the semantics of  the chemical. Rather, it also modifies the understanding of discovery. On the one hand, by linking ‘child’ and ‘discovery’, the title prompts us to rethink scientific activity – namely in terms of  fatherhood, authority, and authorship. This indicates that the object of research does not pre-exist, simply awaiting discovery and observation. Instead the (experimental) investigation has to create that which it is called upon to bear witness to. The figure of  the problem child shows us the scientist as a creator giving form, life and, especially, meaning to his ‘creature’.8 On the other hand, title and cover picture stage a locution which identifies scientists as the fathers of  their discoveries. Hofmann plays the role of  LSD’s (albeit non-biological) father. His paternity test is positive and accepted worldwide. The figures of  father and child, moreover, invite us to consider the biography of  the chemical within the context of  family relations. Accordingly, the third position of  the familial triad does not remain vacant. When asked, if  he was the father of  LSD, who the mother might be, Hofmann answered that all the substances he synthesized emanate from ergot: ‘The mother is ergot. Everything derives from this lysergic acid.’9 In Hofmann’s answer ergot figures as the anthropomorphized mother

7

8 9

Jacques Derrida, ‘Der “Entzug” der Metapher, in Anselm Haverkamp, ed., Die paradoxe Metapher (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp 1998), 197–234. Derrida links his theory of  the metaphor to the semantic field of  the Greek term μεταφορικός (metaphorikos), which is built up of  transit, transport, transfer, transmission, transformation, etc. For him, tropes per se neither indicate, nor represent anything. Exclusively, it is the configuration of  terms, and the transmissions of  their notions that turn to be productive. Meaning is the consequence of  terms and their notions that refer and fade to others, transforming one another inside of  the semantic system. Several examples of naming LSD creature (Geschöpf) in Albert Hofmann, LSD – My Problem Child. Interview with Arthur Godel, 25 April 1993, put on record on the audio CD Albert Hofmann, Erinnerungen eines Psychonauten. Von der Entdeckung entheogener Drogen (Cologne: suppose, 2003). The German phrase turns into a tautological wordplay: the rye fungus ergot is ‘Mutterkorn’. Hence, translated literally, Hofmann says: ‘The mother is the mother-grain.’

The Biography of a Psychotropic Substance

231

of  the chemical. In narrative terms, Hofmann rescues the substance from the status of orphan. To clarify, it is not the aim of  this article to reduce the status of  the object of  Hofmann’s inquiry to that of a constructed or a purely discursive phenomenon. Rather, bearing in mind theories of science and experimentation that, without claiming interpretative predominance, re-associate the worlds of matter and of ideas,10 I want to reject the antagonism as well as the radical distinction between fact and artifice. The figure of a child, emanating from the fertile collaboration of a natural substance and scientific activity, provides an example of  theoretical conceptions of  the third such as faitiches that are at the same time real/substantial/material and discursive/social/cultural. With this neologism – which is a semantic cutting cross of  the terms fact (fait) and fetish (fétiche) – Bruno Latour marks the twofold condition of scientific objects seeking to transgress the dualism of naturalism (asserting that the universe is based upon natural laws and forces exclusively) and radical constructivism (stressing that it is nothing else but a subjective creation). According to him, both terms fact and fetish have in common the aspect of  fabrication.11 Corresponding to Latour’s theoretical direction of impact based upon the faitiche, the configuration of  the child LSD, the mother ergot, and the father Hofmann allows for a reading of scientific objects as both natural and artificial. They are stable and elemental as much as they are ephemeral, having shape and external determination. But their double nature – in the sense of character – does not contradict itself; rather it is complementary. In fact, the child LSD is simultaneously a natural substance and a manufactured one that absorbs, ref lects and produces cultural meaning. 10 As for example the works of  Lorraine Daston, Bettina Wahrig, Michael Hagner, Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, Bruno Latour, Steve Woolgar, Simon Schaf fer, Steven Shapin, and Peter Galison underline the social and cultural features of nature, they argue that science is a human endeavour, finally, and that knowledge emerges by means of interactions of nature and human beings. 11 Cf. Bruno Latour, Pandora’s Hope, Essays on the Reality of  Science Studies (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999); Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993).

232

Jeannie Moser

Father, mother and child – even the structure of Hofmann’s biography is subject to genealogy as an organizing principle. As in the literary genre of a family saga, Hofmann commences the narration of  LSD’s discovery by giving some background information about its parents. In the first chapter, entitled ‘How LSD Originated’, he writes about the mother: ‘Ergot, more than any other drug, has a fascinating history, in the course of which its role and meaning have been reversed: once dreaded as a poison, in the course of  time it has changed to a rich storehouse of valuable remedies.’12 Hofmann dedicates some paragraphs to that history, before switching to the scientific exploitation of  the ergot substances at Sandoz. To a certain extent, in the first chapter Hofmann undertakes the task of a historian of science. He tries to give order to the set-up of  theory, and to organize scientific developments in the form of a historical narration. He reconstructs all the local, institutional, technical, instrumental, methodological, and social conditions of  the emergence of  LSD.13 In the terms of system theorist Niklas Luhmann, Hofmann engages in a secondorder observation: he observes the course of observations, considering all its circumstances and surroundings, with its complex setting in mind.14 But, since a second-order observation constitutively builds upon distance, the chemist’s manoeuvre turns out to be an epistemologically aporetic one: he is part of  the epistemic milieu and actively participates in the observations he is observing. Notwithstanding the impossibility of changing his actual position within the system, Hofmann traces all the ‘inf luential events and decisions that eventually steered [his] work toward the synthesis of 

12 Hofmann, LSD – My Problem Child, 39. 13 Corresponding to Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, Hofmann reconstructs an experimental system, ‘the basic unit of experimental activity’ that combines all those aspects, see Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, Toward a History of  Epistemic Things. Synthesizing Proteins in the Test Tube (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 238. 14 Cf. Niklas Luhmann, Beobachtungen der Moderne (Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1992). Luhmann ascertains the transposition to second order observation as a characteristic of scientific practice in modernity. From now on, the circumstances and the conditions of  knowledge about nature are spotlighted – and not nature as such. Science is oriented to the mediated instead of immediacy.

The Biography of a Psychotropic Substance

233

LSD’.15 According to him, LSD owes its existence to a unique ‘concurrence of circumstances’; without them, the psychotropic substance ‘might never have been created’.16 Hofmann takes into account epistemic aspects, such as previous knowledge about ergot, his own preliminary research findings, and the work of international chemists, as well as of  the pharmaceutical department in Basel. Economic interests, such as the competitiveness of  the Sandoz Company, were likewise crucial. However, ‘[t]he most decisive step was my choice of employment upon completion of my chemistry studies’,17 argues Hofmann. But why did Hofmann take up this career in the first place? What was the initial event causing him to become a research chemist? What is the history of  LSD’s father? It is a paratext that helps us to answer these questions. In the foreword to LSD – My Problem Child, Hofmann reveals the paternal history through an autobiographical anecdote. He describes a marvellous enchantment, which he experienced in childhood. ‘It happened on a May morning’, he says as he begins to describe this ‘deeply euphoric moment’: As I strolled through the freshly greened woods filled with bird song and lit up by the morning sun, all at once everything appeared in an uncommonly clear light. Was this something I had simply failed to notice before? Was I suddenly discovering the spring forest as it actually looked? It shone with the most beautiful radiance, speaking to the heart, as though it wanted to encompass me in its majesty. I was filled with an indescribable sensation of joy, oneness, and blissful security.18

Using the central metaphor of modern enlightenment, Hofmann experienced some more of  these unique moments in clear light. And he places emphasis on the fact that it ‘was these experiences that shaped the main outlines of my world view and convinced me of  the existence of a miraculous, powerful, unfathomable reality that was hidden from everyday sight.’19 Being a child he thought that the communication and depiction of  these 15 Hofmann, LSD – My Problem Child, 35. 16 Ibid., 35. 17 Ibid., 35. 18 Ibid., 29. 19 Ibid., 30.

234

Jeannie Moser

experiences was reserved for poets or artists. He assumed that he ‘would have to keep these experiences to myself, important as they were to me.’20 But these experiences, given as it were an ex post mystical interpretation, assailed him again: Unexpectedly – though scarcely by chance – much later, in middle age, a link was established between my profession and these visionary experiences from childhood. Because I wanted to gain insight into the structure and essence of matter, I became a research chemist. Intrigued by the plant world since early childhood, I chose to specialize in research on the constituents of medicinal plants. In the course of  this career I was led to the psychoactive, hallucination-causing substances, which under certain conditions can evoke visionary states similar to the spontaneous experiences just described. The most important of  these hallucinogenic substances has come to be known as LSD.21

Retrospectively, the childhood-experience becomes decisive and a matter of special importance. First of all, it will of fer a more profound explanation for Hofmann’s career choice and personal development. According to the narrative logic, it appears consistent that he wished to gain insight into the structure and essence of matter that caused him to experience such euphoric moments. Secondly, Hofmann links the experience of childhood to the experiences triggered by LSD. He suggests that those two belong to the same type of enlightening experiences. Hofmann’s return to childhood leads to the assumption that there exists an authentic, pre-discursive, immediate, spontaneous, and pristine form of experience still unaltered by cultural and normative shaping. This form of experience is performed in contrast to the mundane and profane one of adults: ‘It seemed strange that I, as a child, had seen something so marvellous, something that adults obviously did not perceive – for I had never heard them mention it.’22 Highly romanticized by Hofmann, the experience of  the little boy depicted in the foreword stands for genuine truth. According to Hofmann, a substance like LSD can evoke visionary states similar to the experiences of  this undisciplined 20 Ibid., 30. 21 Ibid., 30. 22 Ibid., 30.

The Biography of a Psychotropic Substance

235

and innocent boy. The substance restores to the scientist a child’s perspective supposedly free of cultural distortion that guarantees true vision. The substance allows for what Hofmann calls a ‘mystic-religious’ experience of nature, which he understands as self-revelatory and self-explicating. Finally, placing this autobiographical anecdote as the exposition of  the book (whose aim it was to give a comprehensive picture of LSD), Hofmann establishes a congruity between the histories of researcher and researchobject. Hence, thirdly, the biography of  the substance is linked to the autobiography of  Hofmann himself. The history of  the substances is rooted in the childhood of its discoverer. ‘In order to tell the story of  the origin of  LSD, then’, Hofmann remarks, ‘I must also touch brief ly on my career as a chemist, since the two developments are inextricably interrelated.’23 But, it is not only the career that needs to be told. The chemist himself, in the sense of an individual and peculiar person, asks for characterization. The anecdote suggests that Hofmann was predestined. When we recall that the substance, according to Hofmann, requires certain conditions for evoking significant visionary states of mind, he appears in a certain way as the chosen one.

II.  The concurrence of circumstances and the lucky accident Although, on the one hand, Hofmann talks about chance and unpredictability, on the other hand his narrative gives the impression of inevitability and of a certain authorial coerciveness. All the disparate historic incidents fall into place. The developments and occurrences that, at first glance, seem to be independent and random, condense and grow more acute. By dint of narration, the synthesis of  LSD, resulting from the lucky concurrence of circumstances, looks fateful, consistent, and logical.

23

Ibid., 35.

236

Jeannie Moser

The motto of  the first chapter of  LSD – My Problem Child, which is concerned with the conditions of  LSD’s emergence, is a quotation from Louis Pasteur: ‘In the realm of scientific observation, luck is granted only to those who are prepared.’ And Hofmann begins to tell us: ‘Time and again I hear or read that LSD was discovered by accident. This is only part true.’24 Hofmann keeps emphasizing that LSD neither emerged by pure chance nor isolated from its context, which was in fact a strictly planned and systematic research project. Referring to Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, we can classify the research set-up described by Hofmann as an optimally operating experimental system: it oscillates between calculation and coincidence, control and transgression, stability and variability, plan and error; between acquired working-techniques and misfortune something unpredictable could happen, something new could surface.25 The first part of  the book serves to lend the motto the force of epistemological statute. The childhood experience serves as the initial moment of  the discovery story; it serves as a prelude to the accident, and it dramatizes chance. Luck was granted to Hofmann, presumably because he (or rather, his mind) was prepared – at least retrospectively. In the end, the concurrence of circumstances, in the way Hofmann arranges them, could ‘steer’ his work toward nothing else but the detection of  the psychic ef fects of  LSD.26 The narrative of discovery performs the fortuity as a singular occurrence, and makes it a meaningful one. Hofmann tells us that he had already synthesized LSD – one of  the ergot-derivatives – in 1938, but it displayed no extraordinary properties. He decided, nonetheless, to experiment again with ergot five years later. It was a strange premonition, a ‘peculiar presentiment’ and ‘feeling’ as he calls it, that led him to return to that pharmaceutical substance.27 ‘This was quite unusual’,28 explains Hofmann stressing the particularity of  his approach. 24 Ibid., 35. 25 Cf. Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, An Epistemology of  the Concrete. Twentieth-Century Histories of  Life (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010); Rheinberger, Toward a History of  Epistemic Things. 26 Albert Hofmann, LSD – My Problem Child, 35. 27 Ibid., 46. 28 Ibid., 46.

The Biography of a Psychotropic Substance

237

It was neither objective fact nor proven data that motivated his continued research. Instead, an inexplicable, imprecise and speculative intuition led him to suspect that the substance could perhaps display properties that had not emerged during the initial analysis. Hofmann himself did not anticipate the overwhelming psychoactive ef fects that the substance would have on the human nervous system. ‘When LSD was already five years old’, only by accident did he get to know – in his own words – ‘the unforeseeable ef fects in my own body – more precisely, in my own mind.’29 By accident, the toxic substance got into Hofmann’s body. And it remains unfathomable to him how that could happen: ‘How had I managed to absorb this material? Because of  the known toxicity of ergot substances, I always maintained meticulously neat work habits. Possibly a bit of  the LSD solution had contacted my fingertips during crystallization, and a trace of  the substance was absorbed through the skin.’30 It is striking that Hofmann disregards the substance’s invasion of  his body, the ingestion-procedure itself, and that he abbreviates its ripple ef fect. He does not tell us what happens exactly; rather the narration actuates the sudden surprise and spotlights the incident’s inexplicability. As Hofmann reports, he was ‘disturbed by unusual sensations’ and forced to interrupt his work in the laboratory, ‘being af fected by a remarkable restlessness’.31 He went home and drifted into a hazy state of neardelirium. Although his eyes were closed, he was assailed by fantastic images of extraordinary plasticity and intensive colours. After about two hours this state gradually faded. The symptoms caused him to suspect a toxic reaction, which he assumed was induced by the substance he was working with. In order to get to the bottom of  this curious experience he decided to start auto-experimenting.

29 Ibid., 35. 30 Ibid., 47. 31 Ibid., 47.

238

Jeannie Moser

III.  Becoming Third in auto-experimentation Embedded into Hofmann’s LSD-biography is the copy of  the protocol of  this first auto-experimentation (see Figure 2).

Figure 2. Protocol of  Hofmann’s first auto-experimentation. Albert Hofmann, LSD – Mein Sorgenkind. Die Entdeckung einer ‘Wunderdroge’ (Munich: dtv, 2002), 28. ©/courtesy of  Klett-Cotta-Verlag.

The entry in his journal, dated 19 April 1943, begins with the production, synthesis and quantity of  the ingested substance, as well as date and time stamp. This is followed by the entry: ‘17:00: Beginning dizziness, feeling of anxiety, visual distortions, symptoms of paralysis, desire to laugh.’ At this point the notes break of f. Two days later he fills in the following supplement: ‘Home by bicycle. From 18:00 – ca. 20:00 most severe crisis.’ In brackets: ‘See special report.’32 32

Ibid., 48.

The Biography of a Psychotropic Substance

239

What is it that makes this experiment a case calling for a special report? It is a substance that manifests its ef fects somewhere inside the individual’s body, or, to be more precise, in the psyche, or, in Hofmann’s words, within the mind. The experiment modifies the experimenter. In the act of autoexperimentation the researcher merges with the object of  his research to form an amalgamation – an amalgamation of chemist and chemical. Together they become a strange, a dizzy and anxious, a paralyzed laughing creature with monstrous and demonic traits: a creature that embodies a theoretical figure of  the third, namely the figure of a hybrid made up of research-subject and research-object. On the one hand, this hybrid figure is enormously productive as an epistemological force. It causes turbulences and metonymic shifts, which restructure the research process. For the figure of  the third raises questions which the chemist did not have in mind before. These questions have to do with the stability of reality: how and where is it produced and what is the role of  the subject in its production? What precisely happens in the brain? When a substance, extremely potent in small quantities, can cause such radical changes – what then is the mind? Even though his first selfexperiment ended in a disaster, it was quickly obvious to Hofmann that he had made an astonishing discovery. From now on, he went on expeditions into the vast and mysterious space of  the mind. The exploration of  LSD got intertwined with the question of subjectivity and was concerned with the relationship between the external/chemical/artificial and the internal/ human/natural conditions of perception. It seemed as if, all of a sudden, LSD opened a way to uncover inaccessible dimensions of  being. On the other hand, it is the same hybrid-figure that causes an epistemological paradox. To take part in this discovery, researchers have to make the trip themselves. Because the ef fects of psychedelic intoxication can neither be observed, described, nor evaluated from an external position, the drug-experiment is a special borderline case. Since the drug experiment transforms the mind, and, at the same time, serves to generate knowledge about this mind, a number of problems arise that are worth a closer look. First of all, the analysis of  the object and the analyst get intertwined. And chemically modified mental processes do not only af fect the analysis or interpretation of  the observed, but also of the observer. In the congruence of 

240

Jeannie Moser

those two, the experiment – that is, modern science’s most established truth technology – is confronted with the scientifically questionable practices of introspection and self-analysis. Furthermore, the LSD experiment is a borderline case because the experiences are characterized by a transcendence of space and time, alienation, dissolution, paradox, aporia, ambiguity and contingency. These kinds of experiences can hardly be represented. That obstacle has to be surmounted, because what is true for all epistemic objects is also valid for these extreme states of mind: they have to be conveyable and, consequently, they depend on their representation. Experiences alone do not suf fice. Only what is representable can be managed and thus establish a scientifically reliable epistemic entity. The protocol is certainly the scientific mode of representation par excellence. In association with the idea of giving an authentic and objective account of drug experience in real time, the transcript serves as a purifying agent that takes away the dubious odour of subjectivity. Therefore the protocol – which in the case of drug experiments is a record of one’s own experiences and demands self-discipline – is the main technique of  fixing and structuring the artificially initiated altered state. Separated from the individual body, which paradoxically is the place of action, the experience can thus be translated into language. In other words, the processes of translating and writing claim to establish a distance between the researcher and his object. The process of recording in writing develops a hermeneutics of  the self  that has to gain control over it. Each brainwave, the slightest physical reaction, each change of mood, each sign and signal has to be registered. But the protocol only guarantees to a certain point the externalization and alienation that is required of a scientifically correct analysis. During the LSD experiment, the researcher is no longer able to keep a record of everything. He is thus unable to neutralize the moments of  being out of control: his motor function fails. In LSD – My Problem Child Hofmann comments on the notes in his laboratory journal: ‘I was able to write the last words only with great ef fort.’33 A torrent of personal experience that spreads without organization overwhelms the researcher. He is not able 33

Ibid., 48.

The Biography of a Psychotropic Substance

241

to obey the imperative of immediate representation. The protocol fails. A special report is needed. And so, time passes by. At first it takes two days, then again over thirty years to accomplish a detailed and adequate description. And it can only be produced in retrospect, for only then can the discontinuous experiences be structured meaningfully and convincingly. In the course of  these numerous attempts at representation, the chemical becomes polymorphic.

IV.  Demon and magic drug Written two days after the intoxication and recapitulated in 1975, the special report articulates the crisis, a really bad trip. According to the chemist, the world seems to be distorted, the surroundings transformed in terrifying ways, and not only the environment becomes alien, but also humans are subject to deformation: ‘She was no longer Mrs. R., but rather a malevolent, insidious witch with a colored mask.’34 More than thirty years after the fateful day in April, Hofmann inserts for LSD the figure of an uncanny demon, which intrudes into the experimental arrangement and takes possession of  him: Even worse […] were the alterations that I perceived in myself, in my inner being. Every exertion of my will, every attempt to put an end to the disintegration of  the outer world and the dissolution of my ego, seemed to be wasted ef fort. A demon had invaded me, had taken possession of my body, mind, and soul. I jumped up and screamed trying to free myself  from him, but then sank down again and lay helpless on the sofa. The substance, with which I had wanted to experiment, had vanquished me. It was the demon that scornfully triumphed over my will.35

34 Ibid., 49. 35 Ibid., 49.

242

Jeannie Moser

Like Frankenstein’s monster the demon crows disdainfully over his creator, acquires an independence of  his own, and becomes himself a creator by ‘bringing forth such dramatic alterations in how human consciousness experiences the inner and outer world.’36 The substance becomes animate in the staged invasion scenario. It becomes the aggressor, who gains control and cruelly manipulates. Fate materializes. Hofmann, who started experimenting in order to produce data about an unknown object, now no longer recognizes himself. ‘That is a horrifying experience’, says Hofmann, ‘the feeling, not to be me anymore. I lose myself.’37 In spite of its considerable ef forts, the subject is unable to dominate the object. The substance claims victory. The subject, having lost sovereignty, fears passing out, going insane, or, ultimately, dying: ‘My body seemed to be without sensation, lifeless, strange. Was I dying? Was this the transition?’38 One can recognize particles of  the Christian narrative of resurrection when Hofmann continues later on: Slowly I came back from a weird, unfamiliar world to reassuring everyday reality. The horror softened and gave way to a feeling of good fortune and gratitude […] Now, little by little I could begin to enjoy the unprecedented colours and plays of shapes that persisted behind my closed eyes. Kaleidoscopic, fantastic images surged in on me, alternating, variegated, opening and then closing themselves in circles and spirals, exploding in coloured fountains, rearranging and hybridizing themselves in constant f lux […] Exhausted, I then slept, to awake next morning refreshed, with a clear head […] A sensation of well being and renewed life f lowed through me […] The world was as if newly created. All my senses vibrated in a condition of  highest sensitivity, which persisted for the entire day.39

The trip comes to a good ending. And in the spirit of  the modern Enlightenment narrative of  the expulsion of demonism, acquaintance and experience are the sources of (re-) empowerment. They are the securest antidote, and the remedy for future occupations by the demon, which in the

36 Ibid., 50. 37 Hofmann, Erinnerungen eines Psychonauten. 38 Hofmann, LSD – My Problem Child, 49. 39 Ibid., 50 et seqq.

The Biography of a Psychotropic Substance

243

ancient world figured as the messenger of divine fate, or who was associated in the medieval Christian imagination with vicious and dark powers.40 For Hofmann, 30 years after his first experiment, adds the following comment: ‘fear and horror came over me, especially because at that time I had no knowledge of demons giving up their victims.’41 It is this certain knowledge that enables the successful anchoring of the unsettling, the strange and unknown in the epistemic order and the removal of  the drug’s aura of  fright and fear. Hand in hand with the integration of  the demon as a manageable epistemic entity goes a re-codification of  the drug. Now it no longer appears as a totally incalculable, disrupting factor. LSD is described as a personalized figure that defies prediction. Like dreams, says Hofmann, LSD is beyond calculability. It allows for the possibility of insanity as well as enlightenment. It acts without authority and gathers momentum. Nevertheless, it figures more and more as a useful instrument, medium, and a mediating magic tool. From the second chapter on, LSD – My Problem Child is dedicated to the exploration of  the beneficial potential of  the drug. Hofmann reports his own work on LSD, as well as giving an overview of  the lines of inquiry until 1975. Even if it is hard to imagine today, in its beginnings LSD was one of  the most remarkable, sensational and intriguing chemicals of scientific research.42 The lines of inquiry and motivations associated with LSDexperiments range from simulating and modelling psychosis in order to observe general psychopathological phenomena to the artificial reproduction of mystical experience, in order to study this state of mind. By inducing a brief ly exceptional state of mind psychiatric experiments claimed to explain mechanisms of  ‘normal’ (rational) thought, cognition and perception. LSD even found its use in the field of psychotherapy as it developed 40 Cf. Joachim Ritter, ed., Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1972). 41 Albert Hofmann, LSD – Mein Sorgenkind. Die Entdeckung einer ‘Wunderdroge’ (Munich: dtv, 2002), 92, translation JM. 42 Cf. David Healy, The Creation of  Psychopharmacology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002); Sadie Plant, Writing on Drugs (London: Faber & Faber, 1999).

244

Jeannie Moser

from Freud, where the substance itself  figures as a medium of representation. This psychotherapy was dominated by the presumption that LSD can bring to the surface suppressed contents of consciousness more easily. It was claimed that LSD was able to reach into the complex metaphysical deep-structure of  human life and represent it in experience. The chemical was considered to be a potent mediator between inside and outside, the unconscious and the consciousness. Like a catalyst, LSD was thought to accelerate trauma therapy.43 And years before LSD had spread into counterculture, the substance was conceptualized as a tool that allows one to fathom arcane fantastic worlds and foreign countries, as an operator and instrument for expanding the mind. Like a kind of prosthesis, the drug was said to improve the senses and heighten the awareness. Demon, medium, mediator, tool, key, catalyst or amplifier – summing up, the qualities and attributes which these figures have in common is that their structural location is a between. The drug is included – even incorporated – and yet excluded; an invisible wanderer between outside and inside. It is imagined as a mere chemical operating indif ferently, and, at the same time, it is seen as inf luencing consciousness, thought and perception.44 It is utterly impossible to decide if  the inebriated experience and the imaginary world accompany the drug, or come out of  the intoxicated human mind itself. Hence, what remains constant throughout the ceaseless biographical process of  formation is that all these figures have striking characteristics of  thirdness. Instead of  forcing the essential distinction of an ‘either-or’, they state the diverse variety of a ‘both-and’. 43 Hofmann refers to Betty Eisner, ‘The Inf luence of  LSD on Unconscious Activity’, in Richard Crocket, Ron Sandison, and Alexander Walk, eds, Hallucinogenic Drugs and their Psychotherapeutic Use (London: H.K. Lewis, 1963), 140–5; Betty Eisner, ‘Observations on Possible Order within the Unconscious’, in P.B. Bradley, ed., NeuroPsychopharmacology (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 1959), 438–41; Stanislav Grof, Realms of  the Human Unconscious: Observations from LSD Research (New York: Viking Press, 1975); Ron Sandison, ‘Certainity and Uncertainity in the LSD-Treatment of  Psychoneurosis’, in Richard Crocket, Ron Sandison and Alexander Walk, eds, Hallucinogenic Drugs and their Psychotherapeutic Use, 33–6. 44 See e.g. Rudolf  Gelpke, Vom Rausch im Orient und Okzident (Stuttgart: Ernst Klett, 1966).

The Biography of a Psychotropic Substance

245

V.  Authors, authorities, and a generic crossbreed To recapitulate, the book-sized biography takes the place of  the six-lineprotocol. The emerging third in the drug-experiment calls for the privileged representational techniques of  the dominant scientific paradigm to be abandoned. The scientific records have to be supplemented, overlaid, rhetorically shaped and narrativized. In short, the techniques of  literary text production are called for. This way a third type of  text emerges, a generic crossbreed that alternates between the formal criteria of scientific facticity and literary fictionality. Nonetheless, the chemist Hofmann – who never tires of underlining his scientific credentials – considers it as being closer to scientific truth. In an article on epistemic hybrids, Rheinberger asks to what extent certain genres may prove the scientific status of  knowledge. In his view there are dif ferent functions of authorship, dif ferent types of scientific authorities, and dif ferent modes of scientific writing that correspond to particular phases of  the research process. On the first level of research, knowledge is articulated in primary forms of writing such as a scribbled note in a protocol. The written does not serve the purpose of external communication. Hence, undisciplined and pre-normative creativity, literary practices and apparent subjectivity are still allowed. One can identify the author, comparable to a poet or artist. On the subsequent levels, the scientist removes himself  from the immediate scene of research. An identifiable author disappears more and more. The modes of writing attain to progressively greater scientific status. One finds printed abstracts, articles, reviews and finally textbooks. These increasingly avoid the first person singular, until at the end of  the progression it disappears altogether. The grammatical structure of such a text is geared to the criterion of objectivity. It claims that the objects are self-explanatory and that they speak for themselves. It claims that they tell their own tales and biographies. Correspondingly, the subject is to be grammatically silenced. Not until the author purges himself from subjectivity is he able to assert his scientific authority. The more a particular and unique

246

Jeannie Moser

author disappears, the more felicitously a text articulates knowledge that meets scientific criteria.45 This description of exemplary or ideal process of scientification, dramatized by the form of writing, raises the question of which types of authors and authorities LSD – My Problem Child performs. How is knowledge produced in auto-experimentation articulated, and which genre is appropriate to fix it as a text? How does it turn into data? Apparently, the normal process of  lending something scientific stature does not apply easily to the exploration of  the psychotropic substance LSD and the hybrid it gives rise to. Based on that discordance, I will now trace how scientific correctness can be guaranteed in spite of  this, and how the making of data may succeed. However, in this borderline case the subject cannot be suppressed and silenced. We have to bear in mind that the researcher is part of  the object he is exploring, and the drug only shows its ef fects in interdependency with him. Or, as we have seen already above, in order to tell the story of  LSD, Hofmann has to talk about himself, ‘since the two developments are inextricably interrelated’.46 So when the prevalent demand made of scientists is to allow objects to speak for themselves, the drug researcher has in a sense to detach a part of  himself, alienate and distance that part, objectivize it and give it a voice. Paradoxically, he has to talk in two voices at once. Regarding the first phase of writing, that is the protocol, the author fails. He finds himself in a state of  total crisis. Therefore, the protocol is not the realm of creative productivity. ‘Only with great ef fort’ can words be written. ‘Desire to laugh’ are the last three words before the protocol ceases. As a start, the special report details the crisis. More than 30 years later, in LSD – My Problem Child, Hofmann retells the content of  the special report, arranging, structuring and commenting on the experiences again. Accordingly, what was commenced with a protocol of six lines, finds its continuation in a project of representation, which culminates in the book LSD – My Problem Child.

45 Cf. Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, Iterationen (Berlin: Merve, 2005), 74–100. 46 Hofmann, LSD – My Problem Child, 35.

The Biography of a Psychotropic Substance

247

One gets the impression that creativity intensifies in proportion to the time that has elapsed since author and text left the primary level of research, that is to say the actual experimental situation. The world experienced under the ef fect of drugs, which is occupied by grotesque demons and witches, assumes its definite form owing to various figurative and narrative interventions. Though the pool of chemical symbols helps represent the structural formula of  LSD, it does not manage to describe precisely and broadly that fantastic world. For the latter, Hofmann exploits the repertoire of more f lexible terms and forms of fered by literature, as well as its archive of narratives and constellations of dif ferent figures. To him, they seem more adequate for providing an overall view that approximates to that world’s truth.

VI.  Making epistemic hybrids scientific Beyond the stereotypical linking of drug-induced states of mind and the virtual, fictitious, and imaginary realms created by literature, it is worth asking how literary techniques and operations serve to establish scientific authority on the level of  the actual text. The dramatized re-narration is an integral part of a strategy that reconstitutes the dissolved ego, as Hofmann called it: a strategy that reinstalls the logical subject that had become a third agent, the author just as much as the authority, which was incapacitated and silenced during the experiment. When Hofmann retells the special report in LSD – My Problem Child, he stages himself as a responsible researcher who, in the search for insight into the truth of nature, is not afraid to risk his life, who runs the gauntlet and is in agony, and who even exposes himself  to madness – even if  by accident. The biography of  the psychotropic substance turns out to be an auto-poietic project. The text performs a researcher, who, after having left this savage yet fantastic world behind, is capable of  transforming any experience into scientific knowledge. And it is then that highly idealized researcher who realizes that his premonition, his ‘peculiar

248

Jeannie Moser

presentiment’ verifies,47 and that he has discovered something really astonishing and unbelievable. In defiance of the bad trip, he evaluates immediately: This self-experiment showed that LSD-25 behaved as a psychoactive substance with extraordinary properties and potency. There was to my knowledge no other known substance with such profound psychic ef fects in such extremely low doses, that caused so much dramatic changes in human consciousness and our experience of  the inner and outer world. […] I was aware that LSD, a new active compound with such properties, would have to be of use in pharmacology, in neurology, and especially, in psychiatry, and that it would attract the interest of concerned specialists.48

It is precisely such an ideal personality that research on LSD demands: a personality which indefatigably accentuates its scientific ethics and clearly seems to rise above suspicion. Especially after 1966, when LSD became disreputable and Sandoz’s distribution of  LSD, even for scientific research purposes, was stopped, the field of drugs research was under considerable pressure to legitimize itself. The scientific community had to designate and highlight its correct approach, its methods and ambitions. Timothy Leary’s and Richard Alpert’s vehemently criticized research projects at Harvard, for example, scandalous reports, and the mass countercultural circulation of  LSD that ironically began at elite American universities that had been involved in the CIA’s psychotropic research, had discredited any examination of  the substance. The borderlines between reliable and dubious research blurred. The Sandoz Company, which for years provided LSD and Psilocybin free of charge to laboratories and clinics worldwide, reacted by discontinuing the provision. Against that historical background, the scientific imperative to make epistemic hybrids disappear and to purify science from all its figures of  the third tightens. Researchers, all the more, strive for sincerity. Hence, in this period, rigorous gestures of demarcation against milieus producing alleged non-scientific results or using drugs for pleasure are striking. The publication of  LSD – My Problem Child emerges as such a gesture, and a means of possible rehabilitation. Disassociating himself  from LSD’s subsequent 47 Ibid., 46. 48 Ibid., 51.

The Biography of a Psychotropic Substance

249

career, Hofmann avers: ‘I had no inkling that the new substance would also come to be used beyond medical science, as an inebriant in the drug scene. Since my self-experiment had revealed LSD in its terrifying, demonic aspect, the last thing I could have expected was that this substance could ever find application as anything approaching a pleasure drug.’49 It was at this time that the substance, which in the hands of  the researcher was considered a magic drug, turned out to be his problem child. The drug left the laboratory, the paternal house of science and ended up in bad company: The history of  LSD to date amply demonstrates the catastrophic consequences that can ensue when its profound ef fect is misjudged and the substance is mistaken for a pleasure drug. Special internal and external advance preparations are required; with them, and LSD experiment can become a meaningful experience. Wrong and inappropriate use has caused LSD to become my problem child.50

With LSD – My Problem Child, Hofmann proves that he meets the demands. He proves that he is able to bring to perfection, to remarkableness and meaningfulness any drug experiment, although it is among scientifically questionable practices. The special internal preparation, which he emphasizes, he then testifies autobiographically. Not least, by including the anecdote, Hofmann characterizes himself as a researcher who appreciates the perspective of the child – a perspective which guarantees true vision – and refuses adamantly to indulge in pleasure by means of drugs. In this respect, the book as a whole serves not only to popularize knowledge, but also to highlight that Hofmann is a trustworthy authoritative source. With his biography of LSD, we might say, Hofmann achieves a stabilization of epistemic meaning. To a certain degree, his individual testimony makes evident and scientific the knowledge that drugs research produces, even in auto-experiments. Hofmann himself guarantees that this knowledge is reliable data. Since the hybrid object of research refuses to turn into objectively demonstrable data, since the human element is not to be taken out, and

49 Ibid., 51 et seqq. 50 Ibid., 32.

250

Jeannie Moser

since the accepted strategies of scientification fail, reliability has to issue from the subject.51 On account of  this, the pronoun ‘I’, which according to Rheinberger’s studies is allowed only in the marginal areas of scientific writings, is curiously absent from the protocol, but appears everywhere else. And there, these ego-documents confirm the data.52 The subject that, in normal cases, is garbled and silenced achieves an increasing presence. Hence, a non-anonymous author and techniques of  literary text-production seem to be crucial for rendering scientific knowledge about that epistemic object which carries so many traits and features of  the third. Psychotropic substances such as LSD actuate alternative procedures of epistemic stabilization. Even if  the knowledge remains an epistemic hybrid, they bring out the revaluation of  the subject as source, they cause a recoding of subjectively contaminated experience as a heuristic category, and force us to redefine which epistemic material belongs to the category of scientific data in general. The programme described above ef fectively runs backwards – or rather without direction. LSD – My Problem Child combines genres that are related to various levels of  the research process: articles, reviews and the protocols themselves. Furthermore, the autobiographical passages are embedded. The genres are mixed. Holding authority in the global scientific community, indeed, Hofmann reports his own work and ideas, and gives an overview of current research. But for all that, his structural position is not securely fixed: he permanently alternates between the exterior and the interior of  the experimental system. From one moment to the next he might abandon distance and neutrality in favour of  being utterly involved into the tide of events. Itself a figure of  the third, LSD spawns further such figures: a researcher who forms an amalgamation with his object, a scientist who is a crossbreed made up of observer, historian, informant, literary story-teller and chemically af fected protagonist. The polyphonic biography he narrates can only be about a hybrid of  those two: of  the psychotropic substance and the chemist himself. 51 52

See for the epistemic virtue of objectivity, which demands for the removing of any traces of  humanity and subjectivity: Lorraine Daston, and Peter Galison, Objectivity (New York: Zone, 2007). Cf. Rheinberger, Iterationen.

Notes on Contributors

Editors Ian Cooper is Lecturer in German at the University of  Kent. His main interests are in the relationship between poetry and philosophy since the post-Kantian period. He has published The Near and Distant God: Poetry, Idealism and Religious Thought from Hölderlin to Eliot (2008) and co-edited Third Agents: Secret Protagonists of  Modernity (2008, with E. Knörer and B. Malkmus). He is the author of numerous articles on literary and philosophical topics. Bernhard F. Malkmus is Assistant Professor of  German at the Ohio State University. His research interests and publications focus on social theory and literature, the modern novel, and ecology in German intellectual history. Publications on Melville, Kosinski, Pynchon; Goethe, Sebald, Kluge; narrative theory, money and literature, humanism and post-humanism. He is co-editor of Third Agents: Secret Protagonists of Modernity (2008) and author of  The German Pícaro and Modernity (2011).

Authors Zygmunt Bauman is Emeritus Professor of  Sociology at the University of  Leeds and the University of  Warsaw. His publications include, among numerous others, Legislators and Interpreters (1987), Modernity and the Holocaust (1989), Modernity and Ambivalence (1991), Liquid Modernity (2000), Wasted Lives: Modernity and its Outcasts (2004), and most recently

252

Notes on Contributors

Collateral Damage: Social Inequalities in a Global Age (2011) and Culture in a Liquid Modern World (2011). Ulrich Bröckling is Professor of  Cultural Sociology at the University of  Freiburg. His research focuses on governmentality studies, subjectivation theory, Kultursoziologie and the sociology of warfare and military technology. His publications include the monographs Disziplin (1997) and Das unternehmerische Selbst. Soziologie einer Subjektivierungsform (2007). Andreas Dittrich is a management consultant and independent scholar based in Munich. Major research interests are in early Modernism, the Weimar Classical period, German Idealism and Romanticism, as well as twentieth-century literature. He has published on Hölderlin and German Idealism; on the epistemological contexts of  Musil’s, Broch’s and Thomas Mann’s writings; on Paul Celan’s poetry; and on various topics in intellectual history. Christian J. Emden is Associate Professor of  German Intellectual History and Political Thought at Rice University. He has published extensively on Nietzsche, Benjamin and the history and philosophy of science, most recently Friedrich Nietzsche and the Politics of  History (2008) and two volumes co-edited with David Midgley, Changing Perceptions of  the Public Sphere (2012) and Beyond Habermas: Democracy, Knowledge, and the Public Sphere (2012). Joachim Fischer is Honorary Professor of  Sociology at the Technische Universität Dresden and teaches as visiting professor at other German and Austrian universities. Since 2011 he is president of  the Helmuth Plessner Society. His research focuses on philosophical anthropology, where he has published extensively, on social theory and on the sociology of modernity, most recently Philosophische Anthropologie (2008) and (as co-editor) Theorien des Dritten. Innovationen in Soziologie und Sozial­philosophie (2010).

Notes on Contributors

253

Hannah Landecker is an Associate Professor, holding a joint appointment in the Department of  Sociology and the Institute for Society and Genetics at the University of  California, Los Angeles. She is the author of a history of  tissue culture in twentieth-century life science, Culturing Life: How Cells Became Technologies (2007), and many articles concerning the use of  film and time-lapse imaging in the biosciences. She is currently working on a book called American Metabolism, which looks at transformations to the metabolic sciences wrought by the rise of epigenetics, microbiomics, cell signalling and hormone biology. A related project concerns the history of metabolic hormones after 1960 and the rise of  the cellular ‘signal’ as a central category of  thought and practice in the life sciences. Jeannie Moser is a postdoctoral fellow at the Technical University Berlin. She teaches literary and cultural studies, with a particular focus on the relation between literature and the natural sciences. She has published on the rhetoric and poetics of  knowledge systems as well as on literary theory and is particularly interested in the anthropology of intoxication in the history of scientific experimentation. She is co-editor of  the anthology Wissen. Erzählen. Narrative der Humanwissenschaften (2006). Guido Naschert is a member of  the Research Center for Social and Cultural Studies in Gotha and teaches philosophy at the University of  Erfurt. His main research interests are in early modern philosophy, Radical Enlightenment, Kant, post-Kantian German philosophy, Romanticism, aesthetics, and the dif ferent negotiations between literature and philosophy. Major publications include Ernst Platner (1744−1818). Konstellationen der Aufklärung zwischen Philosophie, Medizin und Anthropologie (2007, with G. Stiening), Friedrich Breckling (1629–1711). Prediger, ‘Wahrheitszeuge’ und Vermittler des Pietismus im niederländischen Exil (2011, with B. Klosterberg), Radikale Spätaufklärung. Einzelschicksale – Konstellationen – Netzwerke (2012, with M. Mulsow), Friedrich Schlegels philosophische Lehrjahre (2013). He is editor of  Friedrich Carl Forberg. Philosophische Schriften (2 volumes, forthcoming 2013).

254

Notes on Contributors

Benjamin Robinson is Associate Professor of  Germanic Studies at Indiana University Bloomington. His current project focuses on the semiotics of indexicality as an intellectual tradition and as a way to organize thinking about the specificity of industrial modernism. His book The Skin of  the System: On Germany’s Socialist Modernity (2009) inquires into the radical distinctness of socialism via the work of  Franz Fühmann. Recent essays touch on the perception of duration in East German films made after the fall of  the wall (‘The State of  Being Done’); the fate of socialist literature since German unification (‘One Iota of  Dif ference’); the prominence of ending versus beginning in the literature of unification (‘The End of an Event’); and how indexical reference relates to naming (‘Was leistet ein Index’). Paul Stenner is Professor of  Social Psychology at the Open University, UK. He has published extensively in the fields of psychosocial methodology, emotionality, health politics and ethics, and his recent books include The Emotions: A Social Science Reader (2008, with Monica Greco), Psychology without Foundations: History, Philosophy and Psychosocial Theory (2009, with Steve D. Brown), Theoretical Psychology: Global Transformations and Challenges (2011, with John Cromby, Johanna Motzkau and Jef ferey Yen), and Doing Q Methodological Research: Theory, Method and Interpretation (2012, with Simon Watts).

Index

Ackernecht, Erwin  211 Adorno, Theodor W.  13–14, 15, 105–26 see also Dialectic of  Enlightenment, Negative Dialectics Agamben, Giorgio  5, 11, 16, 35, 53–5, 144–5, 151–5, 156, 159–60 alter ego  9, 12, 85–91, 96–8 see also ego Althusser, Louis  162–3 ambivalence  9–10, 21, 28, 32–3, 45–6, 56–9, 69, 182, 189 see also dialectic, modernity, paradox antinomy  15, 129–39, 217 see also dialectic, dualism anthropology  84, 150–63 arbitration  38–40, 46, 51, 95–9 Arendt, Hannah  10, 222–3 Aristotle  152, 160–1 art  6–7, 171, 178–9, 181, 234, 245 Bachelard, Gaston  187–8 Bacon, Francis  30 Baker, Henry  170–1 Barthes, Roland  75 Baudrillard, Jean  191 Behler, Ernst  128, 131, 139 Benjamin, Walter  15, 144–5, 156–62 Benveniste, Émile  152 Berkeley, George  150 Bernard, Claude  18–19, 196–211, 223 Bertalanf f y, Ludwig von  198, 218–23 Bhabha, Homi K.  89 The Birth of  Tragedy (Nietzsche)  6–7

Blumenberg, Hans  16, 144–5, 151–60 Bourdieu, Pierre  49 Boussingault, Jean-Baptiste  202 Buber, Martin  84, 86–7, 91 Burton, John  43 Cassirer, Ernst  153 Cohen, Stephen C.  43 Cooley, Charles  86–7 The Critique of  Pure Reason (Kant)  3–4, 49–50 Daston, Lorraine  20, 167, 179, 226–7, 231, 250 death  5–6, 15–16, 35, 113, 151–3, 198, 201–2, 205 deconstruction  15, 29, 106, 110–13, 119–21 deixis  16, 145–9, 152–6, 161–3 see also indexicality; Peirce, C.S. Derrida, Jacques  15, 20, 28, 94–5, 105–26, 161, 229–30 see also Of  Grammatology Descartes, René  17, 124 desire  3, 6, 11, 13, 30, 41–2, 55, 63, 67–73, 78–9, 88–9, 93, 132–7, 144–5, 154, 215 dialectic  2, 4–8, 13–16, 32, 105–26, 127–40, 141–3, 155–7, 160, 198, 205–6, 221 Dialectic of  Enlightenment (Adorno and Horkheimer) 13 see also dialectic, Enlightenment, Negative Dialectics

256 Index Dilthey, Wilhelm  5, 86 disenchantment, enchantment (Weber) 26–7 dualism  7, 17, 100, 197–8, 231 see also ambivalence, dialectic, paradox Dumas, Jean-Baptiste  201–2 Duns Scotus  151, 215 Durkheim, Émile  83, 93, 94 economics  1, 84, 86–8 see also desire; Marx, Karl; Simmel, Georg ego  7–8, 9, 12, 18, 27–8, 68, 85–8, 90–2, 96–8, 101, 124–6, 247–50 see also alter ego Ehrenberg, Christian Gottfried  17, 168, 174–81, 188–91 Elias, Norbert  91 Elkins, James  183–4 emotion  2–3, 11, 37, 53, 57–62, 66–8, 78–81, 92–3 Enlightenment  3, 13, 169, 233, 242–3, 253 see also dialectic, Dialectic of  Enlightenment entropy, negative  209 envy  11, 53–79, 93 exclusion  11, 26, 35, 52, 53–79, 88, 98 see also inclusion faitiche (Latour)  20, 231 Feuerbach, Ludwig  86, 91, 207 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb  132–3, 139 Foerster, Heinz von  53, 56 Follett, Mary Parker  41–2 Forberg, Friedrich Carl  132 ‘form of  life’  7, 9 Foucault, Michel  7, 10, 94 Fox Talbot, William Henry  180–2

Frankfurt School see Adorno, Theodor W.; Dialectic of  Enlightenment; Horkheimer, Max Freud, Sigmund  68, 76, 88–9, 92–3, 101, 244 Gadamer, Hans-Georg  84, 86, 87, 94 see also hermeneutics Galison, Peter  167, 179, 231, 250 Gauchet, Marcel  143 Gehlen, Arnold  94, 96, 151 Geimer, Peter  182–3 Girard, René  3, 11, 53–5, 62, 72–3, 78–9, 89, 93, 95 God, gods  35, 69, 85, 90, 128, 135, 142–3, 147, 154, 157, 216–19 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Elective Af finities  2–4, 21 governmentality  11, 43–4 Haldane, J.B.S.  194, 208, 215 Hartmann, Eduard von  127 Hegel, G.W.F.  2, 4–7, 13–16, 84, 86–7, 105–9, 113–15, 118–20, 124–31, 136–9, 143, 151 see also master/slave dialectic, Phenomenology of  Spirit Heidegger, Martin  4, 5, 15, 16, 151, 153, 215 Hemprich, Friedrich Wilhelm  176–7 Henrich, Dieter  128, 130 hermeneutics  17, 29–30, 87, 240 Hofmann, Albert  19–20, 225–50 Holmes, Frederic Lawrence  194, 200–2, 207 Holocaust  26, 31 Hopkins, Frederick Gowland  194, 208 Horkheimer, Max  13 humanities  31, 81, 83–90, 96–8, 101–2, 142, 145, 147, 226 Humboldt, Alexander von  174–6

Index Hume, David  149–50 Husserl, Edmund  84, 86, 94, 161 hybridity  20–1, 47, 89, 95, 226, 239–42, 245–50 Ichheiser, Gustav  25–6 imagination  3–4, 99, 146–50, 159 immanence  115, 142–3 immediacy  30, 142–3, 150–2, 159, 180, 184–5, 232 see also mediation inclusion  11, 35, 55, 98, 115 see also exclusion indexicality  12, 107, 120, 149–56, 160 see also Peirce, C.S.; secondness infinity  128, 135–8 interruption  21, 39, 52–3, 58–61, 67, 76, 162, 203 intersubjectivity  5, 6, 8–9, 11–12, 62, 75, 133 Jauss, Hans Robert  156–62 jealousy  11, 53–79, 81, 88, 93, 98 ‘jenvy’ 71–8 Jonas, Hans  17–19, 187–90, 214–23 Kant, Immanuel  2–4, 28, 85, 113, 115, 131, 133, 149–51, 163, 175 see also The Critique of  Pure Reason Kelman, Herbert C.  43 Kesselring, Thomas  129–30 Koch, Robert  189, 190–1 Koselleck, Reinhart  1 Kracauer, Siegfried  25 Lacan, Jacques  89, 92, 94, 97 language  7, 14, 16, 29, 32, 60–1, 87, 91–2, 98, 106–26, 145, 151–5, 175, 240 see also death, mediation, representation

257 Latour, Bruno  20, 187, 231 Lavoisier, Antoine  201 law  11, 28, 35, 38, 40, 48, 50, 52, 55, 57, 81, 84, 98–9, 142, 146, 148, 155, 204, 207 natural  133, 231 of excluded middle  27 Leach, Edmund  32–3 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm  175–6 Lennon, John  53 Levinas, Emmanuel  5, 12–13, 85–6, 89 Lévi-Strauss, Claude  94 Lévy-Bruhl, Lucien  32 Lichtenstein, Martin Hinrich  176 Liebig, Justus  206, 211 liquid modernity (Bauman)  25, 30–1, 33 Löwith, Karl  143–45 LSD  19–20, 225–50 Luhmann, Niklas  5, 11, 53, 57, 74–6, 79 Luther, Martin  154 Mannheim, Karl  25 Marquard, Odo  27 Marx, Karl  5, 48, 207–8, 222–3 master/slave dialectic (Hegel)  4–6, 13–15, 86, 99 see also Phenomenology of  Spirit Mead, George Herbert  86, 97, 99 mediation  7, 10–11, 13–14, 16, 37–53, 58–61, 93, 98, 100, 142–3, 145–6, 152, 156, 159 see also dialectic, immediacy, interruption, paralogic mediators  2, 8, 10–11, 29, 38–40, 42, 44–5, 47, 50–2 Mennonites  40, 44 metabolism  18–19, 193–6, 197–9, 206–11, 213–18, 220–4 mimesis  3, 7, 11, 72–3, 79, 228 see also Girard, René

258 Index modernity  1, 7, 9, 13, 20–1, 25–33, 90, 145, 232 see also ambivalence, dialectic, paradox Moleschott, Jacob  207, 223 My Problem Child (Hofmann)  19, 225–30, 232–3, 236, 240, 242, 243, 246–50 Naturphilosophie (Schelling)  174–5 Needham, Joseph  194, 208–9, 216 negation  5–6, 13–14, 16, 113–15, 120, 129–30, 141 Negative Dialectics (Adorno)  14, 105–8, 109, 112–26 see also dialectic, Enlightenment, Dialectic of  Enlightenment Negri, Antonio  155 Niépce, Joseph Nicéphore  180 Niethammer, Friedrich Immanuel  132 Nietzsche, Friedrich  2, 6–8, 126, 207 see also The Birth of  Tragedy Novalis 15 observation  12, 20, 44, 90, 94, 101–2, 169–73, 177–8, 183, 187, 190, 211, 230, 232, 236 see also Luhmann, Niklas Of  Grammatology (Derrida)  14, 105–7, 110–11, 113, 115–17, 120, 122, 125–6 organism  18–19, 54, 169–70, 172–80, 190, 193–6, 198, 202–6, 209, 214–20, 223 paradox  4, 5, 8, 11, 19, 21, 50, 56–7, 73, 75, 77–8, 97, 106–9, 112, 118–21, 123–6, 142–3 and antinomy  129 in biology  202, 205 and hybridity  239–40 of permanent change  221 see also ambivalence, dialectic, dualism, paralogic

paralogic  53, 55–9, 61, 71, 74, 77–9 parasites  21, 55–9, 74, 89, 95, 99–100 see also Serres, Michel Parsons, Talcott  85–6 Pasteur, Louis  236 Paul, Saint  144 Peirce, C.S.  16, 100, 145–9, 156, 161, 163 see also deixis, indexicality Phenomenology of  Spirit (Hegel)  4–7, 14, 84, 86, 114–15 see also master/slave dialectic, recognition photography  18, 168, 180–2 Piaget, Jean  129 Plato  131–2, 135, 160 Plessner, Helmuth  100, 151, 154 postmodernity  9, 25–6, 28 progress  31, 144 Prometheus 154 Proust, Marcel  25 Quakers  38, 40, 44 reason  3–4, 13, 16, 133, 145 recognition  5–6, 29, 84, 86, 87, 157 see also master/slave dialectic, Phenomenology of  Spirit representation  4, 7, 12, 17, 32, 99, 109–10, 113, 119–20, 167–8, 174, 177–8, 181, 184, 186–91, 227–8, 240–1, 244–6 representationalism  18, 168–9, 191 Rheinberger, Hans-Jörg  168, 180, 187–8, 190–1, 199, 231–2, 236, 245–6, 250 rivals  10–11, 53, 63–8, 70–3, 78, 81, 88–9, 95, 98–9 Royal Society  169–70, 172–3, 180 sacrifice  41, 54, 113–14, 155 Sartre, Jean-Paul  31, 86, 89 scapegoats  11, 54–5, 89, 95

259

Index Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph  133, 139, 174–5 see also Naturphilosophie Schlegel, Friedrich  15, 127–39 Schleiermacher, Friedrich  15, 30, 128, 130–3, 137 Schmitt, Carl  144, 160 Schoenheimer, Rudolf  19, 197, 199, 206–7, 210–14, 218, 220–1, 223 Schrödinger, Erwin  209 Schulze, Aenesedimus  132 secondness  16, 146–8, 150, 154–6, 159 see also indexicality; Peirce, C.S. Serres, Michel  11, 20–1, 53, 55–8, 74, 79, 89, 94–5, 227 Service, Elman R.  38–9 Shakespeare, William  68, 73 Simmel, Georg  8, 10, 12, 27–8, 34, 39, 65–6, 82, 88–9, 94–5 see also economics simulation  30, 48, 143, 191 Smith, Adam  86 social imaginaries (Taylor)  9 sociology  8–9, 82, 84, 87, 93, 96 sovereign/sovereignty  1, 8, 11, 35, 49, 51–2, 55, 98, 144, 155, 242 stimulation 48

stranger  10, 12–13, 25–8, 95 systems theory  20, 57, 63, 79, 97, 198, 218, 220 see also Luhmann, Niklas Taylor, Charles  5, 9, 143 Tec, Nechama  31 terrorism  1, 33–4 tradition  27, 30, 36, 123, 142, 158–9 transcendence  13, 142–3, 240 Trembley, Abraham  17, 168–71, 181, 191 trickster  10, 95, 99 Turner, Victor  28 van Leeuwenhoeck, Antonie  17, 168–73, 181, 191 Vattimo, Gianni  143 Waldenfels, Bernhard  12, 82 Wandschneider, Dieter  130 Weber, Max  21, 26, 35, 84 Weigert, Carl  189 Winkelmann, Stephan August  134–5 Wittgenstein, Ludwig  7, 9, 87, 121, 148 Ziegler, Jean  49 Zola, Émile  69

CULTURAL HISTORY AND LITERARY IMAGINATION EDITED BY CHRISTIAN J. EMDEN & DAVID MIDGLEY This series promotes inquiry into the relationship between literary texts and their cultural and intellectual contexts, in theoretical, interpretative and historical perspectives. It has developed out of a research initiative of the German Department at ­Cambridge University, but its focus of interest is on the European tradition broadly perceived. Its purpose is to encourage comparative and interdisciplinary research into the connections between cultural history and the literary imagination generally. The editors are especially concerned to encourage the investigation of the role of the literary imagination in cultural history and the interpretation of cultural history through the literary text. Examples of the kind of issues in which they are particularly interested include the following: – The material conditions of culture and their representation in literature, e.g. responses to the impact of the sciences, technology, and industrialisation, the confrontation of ‘high’ culture with popular culture, and the impact of new media; – The construction of cultural meaning through literary texts, e.g. responses to cultural crisis, or paradigm shifts in cultural self-perception, including the establishment of cultural ‘foundation myths’; – History and cultural memory as mediated through the metaphors and models ­deployed in literary writing and other media; – The intermedial and intercultural practice of authors or literary movements in ­specific periods; – The methodology of cultural inquiry and the theoretical discussion of such issues as intermediality, text as a medium of cultural memory, and intercultural relations. Both theoretical reflection on and empirical investigation of these issues are welcome. The series is intended to include monographs, editions, and collections of papers based on recent research in this area. The main language of publication is English.

Vol. 1 Christian Emden & David Midgley (eds): Cultural Memory and Historical Consciousness in the German-Speaking World Since 1500. Papers from the ­Conference ‘The Fragile Tradition’, Cambridge 2002. Vol. 1. 316 pp., 2004. ISBN 3-03910-160-9 / US-ISBN 0-8204-6970-X Vol. 2 Christian Emden & David Midgley (eds): German Literature, History and the Nation. Papers from the C ­ onference ‘The Fragile Tradition’, Cambridge 2002. Vol. 2. 393 pp., 2004. ISBN 3-03910-169-2 / US-ISBN 0-8204-6979-3 Vol. 3 Christian Emden & David Midgley (eds): Science, Technology and the German Cultural Imagination. Papers from the ­Conference ‘The Fragile Tradition’, C ­ ambridge 2002. Vol. 3. 319 pp., 2005. ISBN 3-03910-170-6 / US-ISBN 0-8204-6980-7 Vol. 4 Anthony Fothergill: Secret Sharers. Joseph Conrad’s Cultural Reception in Germany. 274 pp., 2006. ISBN 3-03910-271-0 / US-ISBN 0-8204-7200-X Vol. 5 Silke Arnold-de Simine (ed.): Memory Traces. 1989 and the Question of German Cultural Identity. 343 pp., 2005. ISBN 3-03910-297-4 / US-ISBN 0-8204-7223-9 Vol. 6 Renata Tyszczuk: In Hope of a Better Age. Stanislas Leszczynski in Lorraine 1737-1766. 410 pp., 2007. ISBN 978-3-03910-324-9 Vol. 7 Christian Emden, Catherine Keen & David Midgley (eds): Imagining the City, Volume 1. The Art of Urban Living. 344 pp., 2006. ISBN 3-03910-532-9 / US-ISBN 0-8204-7536-X Vol. 8 Christian Emden, Catherine Keen & David Midgley (eds): Imagining the City, Volume 2. The Politics of Urban Space. 383 pp., 2006. ISBN 3-03910-533-7 / US-ISBN 0-8204-7537-8 Vol. 9 Christian J. Emden and Gabriele Rippl (eds): ImageScapes. Studies in Intermediality. 289 pp., 2010. ISBN 978-3-03910-573-1 Vol. 10 Alasdair King: Hans Magnus Enzensberger. Writing, Media, Democracy. 357 pp., 2007. ISBN 978-3-03910-902-9 Vol. 11 Ulrike Zitzlsperger: ZeitGeschichten: Die Berliner Übergangsjahre. Zur Verortung der Stadt nach der Mauer. 241 pp., 2007. ISBN 978-3-03911-087-2

Vol. 12 Alexandra Kolb: Performing Femininity. Dance and Literature in German Modernism. 330pp., 2009. ISBN 978-3-03911-351-4 Vol. 13 Carlo Salzani: Constellations of Reading. Walter Benjamin in Figures of Actuality. 388pp., 2009. ISBN 978-3-03911-860-1 Vol. 14 Monique Rinere: Transformations of the German Novel. Simplicissimus in Eighteenth-Century Adaptations. 273pp., 2009. ISBN 978-3-03911-896-0 Vol. 15 Katharina Hall and Kathryn N. Jones (eds): Constructions of Conflict. Transmitting Memories of the Past in European Historiography, Culture and Media. 282pp., 2011. ISBN 978-3-03911-923-3 Vol. 16 Ingo Cornils and Sarah Waters (eds): Memories of 1968. International Perspectives. 396pp., 2010. ISBN 978-3-03911-931-8 Vol. 17 Anna O’ Driscoll: Constructions of Melancholy in Contemporary German and Austrian Literature. 263pp., 2013. ISBN 978-3-0343-0733-8 Vol. 18 Martin Modlinger and Philipp Sonntag (eds): Other People’s Pain. Narratives of Trauma and the Question of Ethics. 252pp., 2011. ISBN 978-3-0343-0260-9 Vol. 19 Ian Cooper and Bernhard F. Malkmus (eds): Dialectic and Paradox. Configurations of the Third in Modernity. 265pp., 2013. ISBN 978-3-0343-0714-7