Life after God: An Encounter with Postmodernism 900451354X, 9789004513549

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Life after God

Studies in Moral Philosophy Series Editor Thom Brooks (Durham University) Editorial Board Chrisoula Andreou (University of Utah) Mark Bevir (University of California, Berkeley) Clare Chambers (University of Cambridge) Fabian Freyenhagen (University of Essex) Tim Mulgan (University of St Andrews) Ian Shapiro (Yale University)

volume 16

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/​simp

Life after God An Encounter with Postmodernism By

Mark Bevir

LEIDEN | BOSTON

The Library of Congress Cataloging-​in-​Publication Data is available online at https://​catalog.loc.gov lc record available at https://​lccn.loc.gov/2022902041​

Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/​brill-​typeface. issn 2211-​2 014 isbn 978-​9 0-​0 4-​5 1354-​9 (hardback) isbn 978-​9 0-​0 4-​5 1355-​6 (e-​book) Copyright 2022 by Mark Bevir. Published by Koninklijke Brill nv, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill nv incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Hotei, Brill Schöningh, Brill Fink, Brill mentis, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Böhlau and V&R unipress. Koninklijke Brill nv reserves the right to protect this publication against unauthorized use. Requests for re-​use and/​or translations must be addressed to Koninklijke Brill nv via brill.com or copyright.com. This book is printed on acid-​free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.

We have the feeling that the ordinary man, if he talks of ‘good’, of ‘number’ etc., does not really understand what he is talking about. I see something queer about perception and he talks about it as if it were not queer at all. Should we say he knows what he is talking about or not? You can say both. Suppose people are playing chess. I see queer problems when I look into the rules and scrutinize them. But Smith and Brown play chess with no difficulty. Do they understand the game? Well, they play it. wittgenstein, “In a Silly Detective Story” [Notes taken by Rush Rees of Wittgenstein’s Lectures, 1936], Philosophical Investigations 7 [1984], 139

… Reason has always existed, but not always in a rational form. Hence the critic can take his cue from every existing form of theoretical and practical consciousness and from this ideal and final goal implicit in the actual forms of existing reality he can deduce a true reality. marx to ruge, Karl Marx Early Texts, ed. David McLellan [Oxford, 1971], p. 80

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Contents  Preface xi  Acknowledgements xii 1  Lived Practice 1 1  The Question of Interpretation 4 2  The Question of Exegesis 9 3  The Question of Arrangement 12 4  The Question of Style 18 5  Conclusion 23

part 1 History 2  On Modernity 27 1  Archaeology or History 28 2  The Human Sciences 32 3  Conclusion 45 3  On Structuralism 46 1  Structural Linguistics 46 2  From Method to Ontology 53 3  After Derrida 61 4  Conclusion 67 4  On the Avant-​Garde 69 1  Poststructuralist Ethics 70 2  Surrealists and Others 77 3  Postmodern Radicalism 83 4  Conclusion 90

part 2 Philosophy 5  On Knowledge 95 1  Saussure and Meaning 96 2  Husserl and Truth 102

viii Contents

3  Excursus on Realism 107 4  Conclusion 116

6  On Subjectivity 117 1  Reclaiming Agency 118 2  Reclaiming Intentionality 125 3  Reclaiming Rationality 131 4  Conclusion 136 7  On the Human Sciences 139 1  Interpreting Texts 140 2  Social Ontology 147 3  Social Explanation 152 4  Conclusion 159

Ethics

part 3

8  On Critique 163 1  Historicism 165 2  Genealogy 169 3  Historical Ontology 174 4  Ideology Critique 179 5  Conclusion 182 9  On Universalism 184 1  Cosmopolitanism 185 1.1  “Spirit” and Spirit 186 1.2  Spirit and Racism 188 1.3  Racism and Hospitality 190 1.4  Hospitality and “Spirit” 191 1.5  “Spirit” and Cosmopolitanism 193 1.6  Cosmopolitanism and “Cosmopolitanism” 195 2  Excursus on Normativity 197 3  Conclusion 202

Contents

10  On Community 205 1  The Community of Fellows 207 2  The Open Community 212 3  Democratic Organization 219 4  Conclusion 226

Conclusion 11  Historicism and Humanism 231 1  History 233 2  Philosophy 236 3  Ethics 240 4  Conclusion 244  Bibliography 247  Index 255

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Preface Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault are my two main interlocutors in Life after God. I would like to think that I come more to praise them than to bury them. Our disagreements with others may loom large when we engage them the better to formulate our own ideas, but the good in their thought should not get interred. There are at least two reasons why we might engage other thinkers. If we find their work interesting and admirable, we might engage them to improve our own ideas. If we believe that they are having a pernicious influence, we might engage them to counter that influence. Both these reasons motivate Life after God. I find the work of Derrida and Foucault of interest in part because they grappled insightfully with my main question. What does it mean to be without God? How should we think about knowledge and ourselves if we do not believe in a transcendent or immanent guiding light, and if we do not believe that we can have access to pure reason or unmediated experience? I find their work admirable here because they remorselessly exposed those of our beliefs and practices that still assume we are with God. Few thinkers have been more zealous in hunting down heretical residues. The range and rigor of their work has challenged me to rethink many of my beliefs, I hope for the better. However, I worry that the wider influence of Derrida and Foucault is proving pernicious. My main worries are the theoretical ones explored in this book. Sometimes their work encourages an overt anti-​humanism. At other times, it encourages a self-​righteous yet vacuous use of critique without any discussion of preferred alternatives. Not for them, alas, the idea voiced by Karl Marx and Ludwig Wittgenstein that after we renounce the alienated gods of religion and reason, we can still turn to everyday life and ordinary language to find resources for reasoned discussion. In addition, I have concerns about the conduct of an intellectual left that is indebted to postmodernism. Far too many postmodernists –​and, alas, I cannot entirely exclude Derrida and Foucault from what follows –​attack straw men. Where, I ask myself, are the contemporary metaphysicians and humanists who really hold the beliefs that the postmodernists ascribe to them? The postmodernists constitute themselves as the elect who alone avoid the fallacies associated with these straw men. Today the elect are marked by their unswerving devotion to the names and vocabularies of their prophets. Worst of all, the elect frequently conduct a righteous crusade against everyone who does not share these marks and so, in the view of the elect, can be assimilated to the straw men. I hope that Life after God might do a little to break down this us-​against-​them mentality, but I will probably just find myself cast among the “them”.

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Acknowledgements I am grateful to all those whose professional and emotional support made my work easier and more enjoyable than it otherwise would have been. While I was writing Life after God, I tested bits of the manuscript in several venues. For permission to draw on these early endeavors, I thank Blackwells, Johns Hopkins University Press, and SAGE.

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Lived Practice The present-​day world appears to have moved beyond something. We are post-​ foundational, poststructural, and post-​modern. All these labels suggest that we have a new, less secure, but more playful stance towards that which we know. We have a new view of ourselves and our ethical responsibilities. However, all these labels are also notoriously vague. What have we moved beyond? Where are we? Where should we go? I will answer these questions by engaging postmodernism and defending a postfoundational historicism and humanism. As a postfoundationalist, I accept the postmodern idea that we have a less secure but more playful stance to that which we know. Yet as a historicist and a humanist, I hold views of people and their ethical responsibilities that differ from those usually associated with postmodernism. Jacques Derrida –​a prominent poststructuralist –​wrote about ethics in two different ways. Sometimes he located ethics in a quasi-​transcendental concept of language. He argued that language precedes being. Language establishes a promise, originary alliance, or pledge, such that to use it is to be “caught, surprised (pris, surpris) in a certain responsibility”.1 At other times Derrida described ethical conduct as the product of a mad decision. He argued that ethics has no natural or reasonable source and no proper content or explanation. Morality can be understood only as impossible, happenstance, or fluke –​ the product of a moment of madness.2 Although these two ways of writing about ethics appear to differ significantly, it is no accident that they –​and they alone –​appear in Derrida’s writings. Derrida’s deconstruction is a negative critique of metaphysics as he conceived it. According to Derrida, metaphysics presupposes, as an explicit ideal or implicit assumption, an ideal philosophical language in which signs refer directly to objects. So, time after time Derrida argued or otherwise indicated that no meaning exists as pure presence given to consciousness outside language. He thought that the designatum of a sign always depends on its 1 J. Derrida, “The Politics of Friendship”, Journal of Philosophy 85 (1988), 634. This article was later expanded as J. Derrida, Politics of Friendship, trans. G. Collins (London: Verso, 1997). Throughout, I rely on the article except when referring to material that appeared only in the book. 2 “For modern thought no morality is possible”: M. Foucault, The Order of Things (London: Tavistock Publishers, 1970), p. 328.

© Mark Bevir, 2022 | DOI:10.1163/9789004513556_002

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relationship to other signs in the language. He believed that the link between an object and its name always must be an indirect one, passing through and perhaps getting lost in a broader language. He thus concluded that there cannot be a philosophical language in which signs have direct relationships to their referents. Maybe Derrida should have qualified his claim. Perhaps the ideal of a philosophical language has dominated only since the seventeenth century. Perhaps it has dominated only in some philosophical traditions. Nonetheless, the ideal of a philosophical language seems to have been hugely influential. Early in the twentieth century, for example, Edmund Husserl developed phenomenology on the assumption that some objects appear to consciousness as pure presences outside language and so are capable of being named individually.3 At much the same time, Bertrand Russell developed a doctrine of acquaintance, according to which the meanings of basic concepts derive from simple experiences that are given directly to mind outside of any theoretical context.4 Derrida’s writings typically try to exhibit the inner failings of all these apparently metaphysical projects with their adherence to an ideal philosophical language. Derrida’s perpetual return to the internal deconstruction of metaphysics suggests that he failed to break free of its spell. Derrida might have accepted this suggestion. After all, he argued that people cannot conceivably leap out of metaphysics since any use of language entails an attempt to name things and so is haunted by the metaphysical ideal of a philosophical language. He argued that to signify is necessarily to try to tie words to objects in a way that remains quasi-​metaphysical. According to Derrida, we are without metaphysics but unable to shake free of its aspirations. Thus he wrote about ethics in the two ways he did. He suggested that we have two options when we sail in the wake of a metaphysics that is unacceptable and yet unavoidable. The first option is to continue to use language in a way that is haunted by metaphysics; we can do things much as we used to while striving to remember the limits of so doing. This option appears in Derrida’s evocation of the quasi-​transcendental and his placing metaphysical concepts under erasure. The other option is to throw up our hands at the hopeless nature of the task; we can declare the impossibility of not only doing what we used to do but also of doing anything other than we 3 E. Husserl, Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology, trans. W. Gibson (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1931). 4 B. Russell, “Knowledge by Acquaintance and Knowledge by Description”, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 11 (1911), 108–​28.

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used to. This option appears in Derrida’s account of ethical action as requiring a mad decision and in his rather loose writing about the impossibility of our escaping language and the text –​writing that can give the false impression that he denied the existence of an external reality. Because Derrida rejected both the validity of metaphysics and the possibility of thinking past metaphysics, he remained transfixed by the light its sun once cast. The onset of night found him talking only of the light of day and the impossibility of our doing without it. He showed little interest in a positive search for other weaker sources of light –​matches, candles, and electric lamps. Matches, candles, and electric lamps are sources of light that people have created in lived practices. As there is no philosophical language, concepts often have a metaphorical character, a point Derrida emphasized. The metaphors of matches, candles, and electric lamps draw attention to the resources that lived practice provides for pondering philosophical questions. Derrida remained so transfixed by metaphysics that the only options he considered were metaphysics, quasi-​metaphysics, or nothing. But why should we not think beyond these options? Why should we not look to life and praxis as sources of meaning, knowledge, and ethics? From the late nineteenth century onwards, philosophers from diverse traditions have adopted meaning holism, according to which words, concepts, or signs do not have a one to one correspondence with objects in the world, but rather attain their content only in relation to one another. Nonetheless, although pragmatists, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and others rejected the philosophical language opposed by Derrida, they did not find themselves torn between quasi-​transcendental and quasi-​nihilistic positions.5 They explored the possibilities of lived practice as a site of philosophical reflection.6

5 L. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. Anscombe (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1972); and R. Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979). On Derrida’s relation to Wittgenstein and pragmatism, see H. Staten, Wittgenstein and Derrida (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1984); S. Wheeler iii, “Indeterminacy of French Interpretation: Derrida and Davidson”, in E. LePore, ed., Truth and Interpretation: Perspectives on the Philosophy of Donald Davidson (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987), pp. 477–​494; and J. Derrida, “Remarks on Deconstruction and Pragmatism”, in C. Mouffe, ed., Deconstruction and Pragmatism (London: Routledge, 1996), pp. 79–​90. 6 On Wittgenstein’s combination of quasi-​transcendentalism with an anthropological focus on lived practice, see J. Lear, Open Minded: Working Out the Logic of the Soul (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), pp. 247–​81.

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The Question of Interpretation

“God is dead”, Friedrich Nietzsche famously wrote.7 In doing so, he made one of the first modern declarations of the end of metaphysics. God stood for any appeal to a transcendent principle or immanent essence that guides actions and gives them meaning and rationality. Derrida’s writings exhibit a concern to finish the task, begun by Nietzsche and continued by Martin Heidegger, of announcing and establishing the end of metaphysics. Derrida tackled this task in part by indicating how these earlier philosophers failed fully to disentangle themselves from the ideal of a philosophical language committed to simple presences. Meaning holism reinforces the negative critique of metaphysics offered by Derrida. Holism implies that signs can refer only in relation to one another. Signs do not have independent essences that present themselves to consciousness. God is indeed dead. Nonetheless, the death of God need not leave people stranded between a sterile nihilism and an attempt to evoke him once more albeit under erasure. Instead, the death of God might encourage a turn to lived practice. Life offers plenty of philosophical resources, and there is life after God. One way of exploring what life offers after God is through an encounter with poststructuralists, such as Derrida and Michel Foucault, and other postmodernists, such as Jean Baudrillard and Jean-​François Lyotard. Other ways of doing so include studies of Wittgenstein, pragmatism, or the place of life in Nietzsche’s thought. Each of these ways of approaching life after God would have its own tune, foregrounding particular notes and themes. Two main themes will echo in the background of my encounter with postmodernism. The first is resistance to the assimilation of meaning holism to postmodernism.8 Appeals to an undifferentiated postfoundationalism can play useful explanatory and argumentative roles, but there are contexts when we need to recognize differences within postfoundationalism. One important difference is that between a purely negative critique of metaphysics and positive attempts to provide alternative analyses of meaning, subjectivity, the human sciences, and ethics. The second theme to echo in the background of my encounter with

7 F. Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. W. Kaufman (New York: Vintage Books, 1974), sec. 125. 8 Contrast Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, pp. 5–​13. On the way Wittgenstein and pragmatists evoke a “given” rarely found in postmodernism, see respectively J. Lear, “Leaving the World Alone”, Journal of Philosophy 79 (1982), 382–​403; and M. Lilla, “On Goodman, Putnam, and Rorty: The Return to the Given”, Partisan Review 51 (1984), 220–​35.

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postmodernism is resistance to the bourgeois complacency of some pragmatists.9 The writings of the postmodernists have an unsettling quality that is absent from those of pragmatists. Like the postmodernists, I believe that the death of God requires reworking ethics as well as philosophy. My reworking of ethics probably will seem insufficient to postmodernists, but it will differ from bourgeois liberalism. To invoke Wittgenstein and the pragmatists alongside the postmodernists is to pose the question, what constitutes postfoundationalism? The short answer is that postfoundationalists reject the possibility of pure experience and pure reason. They believe that experience and reason are never pure since they necessarily depend on prior theories or quasi-​structures. They thus deny that any beliefs can provide certain and unshakeable grounds on which to justify all other beliefs. Experiences and reasoning may be grounds for holding a proposition true, but they do not offer unconditioned knowledge. Any further definition of postfoundationalism consists largely in the implications of this epistemological position. What constitutes postfoundationalism –​or what should –​is thus a question that I will answer through my encounter with postmodernism. Still, there will be those who ask, “who are the foundationalists against whom you define postfoundationalism?” Insofar as I portray the postmodernists as reacting critically to philosophers such as Husserl, I suggest that these other philosophers are foundationalist stalking-​horses. Little is gained, however, from debates about whether or not someone is a foundationalist. One reason to avoid these debates is that labels do not matter. What matter are the implications that follow from a rejection of the possibility of pure experience and pure reason. Another reason for me to avoid these debates is that I am not trying to provide a comprehensive critique of foundationalism. My arguments do not rely on an account of foundationalism that readers need endorse. Nonetheless, when I explore the implications of postfoundationalism, I will tacitly oppose those philosophers whose lingering and implicit belief that there are given truths prevents them accepting these implications. Even when philosophers acknowledge the local nature of all truth claims, they often exhibit wistfulness for foundationalism. They fail to take seriously the implications of this localness. Their repudiation of foundationalism remains a mere gesture. I want to examine what follows from accepting it as a commitment. Would we have to follow the paths cut by postmodernists?

9 Contrast R. Rorty, “Postmodern Bourgeois Liberalism”, in Objectivity, Truth, and Relativism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 197–​202.

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Having skipped over the question of who is a foundationalist, I must linger longer to specify poststructuralism and postmodernism. I use “poststructuralist” to describe Roland Barthes, Derrida, Foucault, and Jacques Lacan, and “postmodernist” to refer to the poststructuralists and a few other French theorists, notably Baudrillard and Lyotard. Although the labels “poststructuralism” and “postmodernism” are often used in these ways, they are not without problems. For a start, the relevant theorists had such different concerns, approaches, and arguments that people may question the legitimacy of grouping them together. Further, even if people grant the legitimacy of this grouping, they may wonder how apt “poststructuralism” and “postmodernism” are as labels given that, for example, Derrida was never a structuralist and Foucault always denied he was a structuralist. Can we treat the postmodernists as a group? Postfoundationalism undermines the idea that intellectual traditions and schools have natural and fixed boundaries. The justification for grouping various thinkers under a common label must be a pragmatic one couched in terms of the value of doing so for the topics being discussed. I want to discuss the death of God to highlight the following: in our historical circumstances, we cannot cling to foundationalist ideas of meaning and truth; nonetheless we can construct and defend alternative analyses of language and knowledge as situated in lived practices; and these alternative analyses prompt a modification of historicism and humanism, not rejections of them. It is in this context that I think the postmodernists can usefully be grouped together. The postmodernists all matured and wrote the works that first made their reputations during the 1960s and 1970s in the intellectual and political context of the French left. They generally wrote in explicit opposition to the then dominant ideas associated with Jean-​Paul Sartre –​phenomenology, existentialism, and humanism. They challenged these ideas through an examination of language. Most argued that language prefigures the objects of the mind; language is not fully open to choice; it constantly breaks free of people’s intentions. Here, the postmodernists generally sympathized with the avant-​garde, championing its literature and identifying at least to some extent with its politics. Finally, the postmodernists generally attempted to rethink a leftist standpoint in the wake of May 1968. They explored the implications of their accounts of language for social theory. To recognize these similarities among the postmodernists is not to deny their differences. It is just that the issues I want to consider place a premium on their shared hostility to metaphysics and humanism. Can we describe Barthes, Derrida, Foucault, and Lacan as poststructuralists? Can we describe them, Baudrillard, and Lyotard as postmodernists? We should not worry too much about the particular label we attach to a group

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of thinkers provided we agree about what they believed. Further, although some “poststructuralists” and “postmodernists” expressed qualms about these particular labels, their qualms are probably best understood as expressions of disquiet at finding themselves assimilated to a group. Commentators group thinkers together for pragmatic reasons related to what they want to discuss. In contrast, individual thinkers characteristically focus on the adequacy of these discussions to their unique ideas, and this focus can prejudice them against attempts to place them in a group. Thus, the fact that theorists complain about being assimilated to a group should not constitute an objection to that grouping. Even when their complaints highlight differences between them and those they are assimilated to, the differences do not make assimilation inappropriate for all purposes. Let me preview my account of the emergence of poststructuralism and postmodernism. Barthes, Foucault, and Lacan drew on structuralist thinkers such as Ferdinand de Saussure, Gaston Bachelard, and Claude Lévi-​Strauss to develop their early positions in opposition to Sartre. In doing so, they adopted many of the ideas associated with structuralism, where structuralism is itself a label that covers diverse thinkers and needs to be justified in terms of its pragmatic value in relation to particular topics of discussion. Although Derrida never exhibited a similar debt to structuralism, after his early studies of Husserl, his work deconstructed many of the heroic figures of the structuralist movement, including Saussure, Lévi-​Strauss, and Foucault. Derrida thereby played an important role in the shift from structuralism to poststructuralism. Earlier Barthes and Foucault had concentrated on challenging the idea of the autonomous subject that they associated with writers such as Sartre. They had shown little interest in developing a critique of structuralist epistemology. On the contrary, they often gave the impression that their own work was objective and even a contribution to a structuralist science. Derrida argued that their accounts of language and subjectivity contradicted their implicit claims to scientific certainty and objective truth. Thereafter, Barthes and Foucault changed their positions, maybe because of the influence of Derrida or maybe for other reasons. They remained critical of the Sartrean analysis of the subject, but they also took a more critical stance to all claims to truth. Poststructuralism consists, therefore, in hostility to analyses of knowledge and subjectivity associated with philosophers such as Husserl and Sartre. This hostility returns us to Derrida’s critique –​but perhaps I can now say the poststructuralist critique –​of what he described as an ideal philosophical language in which signs have independent relationships to extra-​linguistic objects that are allegedly present to an autonomous subject.

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The poststructuralists also owed a debt to the avant-​garde. It is this debt that makes them, along with Baudrillard and Lyotard, postmodernists. The avant-​garde, from Dada through surrealism to situationism, tried to overturn the modernity they believed had emerged out of Enlightenment reason and industrial capitalism. They thought modernity was complacent and bourgeois, unreasonably confident of its own rationality, morality, and progressiveness. They challenged modernity through artistic and social practices that rejected individual creation in favor of the absurd and chance, the irrational and play. The influence of the avant-​garde on Barthes, Derrida, and Foucault appears in the overlap of its ideas and those characterizing poststructuralism. The avant-​garde’s hostility to the aesthetic of individual creativity reappears in the poststructuralists’ rejection of the autonomy of the subject. The avant-​garde’s emphasis on absurdity and play reappears in the poststructuralists’ rejection of objective certainty and emphasis on the contingency and incompleteness of structures. Avant-​garde ideas also influenced people with few ties to structuralism. Postmodernism covers Baudrillard and Lyotard as well as the poststructuralists. In France during the 1960s and 1970s, the avant-​garde offered postmodernists a leftist alternative to the humanist Marxism of Sartre. The avant-​garde had tried to overturn bourgeois modernity and reveal “the real”. Although postmodernists rejected the idea of “the real”, they remained attached to an avant-​ garde radicalism. Historians might debate whether the decisive rejection of bourgeois modernity came with the high modernism of the late nineteenth-​ century or the postmodern rejection of “the real”. In either case, however, postmodernism involved hostility to modern analyses of reason. This hostility brings us back again to the poststructuralist critique –​but perhaps I can now say the postmodern critique –​of an ideal philosophical language in which signs possess an independent relationship to extra-​linguistic objects such that these links provide a foundation for knowledge. Postmodernism arose against a background of structuralism and the avant-​ garde. Thereafter, it oscillates between two aspects. On one side, postmodernism appears as a purely negative critique of foundationalism. Postmodernists reveal the tensions, impossibilities, and baneful consequences of foundationalism, metaphysics, and modern rationality, without telling us much, if anything, about what might replace these ways of thinking. They reject pure facts and pure reason without offering an alternative epistemology. They reject autonomy without exploring how, if at all, to make sense of agency. If readers think of postmodernism as a purely negative critique, my aim is to promote a postfoundational historicism and humanism as the positive counterpart it so needs. On its other side, postmodernism appears as a positive vision of what

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should replace foundationalism. Postmodernists sometimes seem to reject agency as well as autonomy. They invoke knowledge solely as an invidious form of power that imposes itself on the individual. If readers focus on the positive side to postmodernism, my aim is to exhibit its failings and promote the alternative of a postfoundational historicism and humanism. 2

The Question of Exegesis

Questions of interpretation extend from aggregate concepts and historical narratives to the exegesis of authors and texts. I am less interested in exegetical issues than philosophical ones. My engagement with postmodernism is not intended to be a complete and definitive study of the beliefs of Derrida and Foucault. It aims to raise philosophical issues and to discuss alternative responses to these issues. I would be fairly content if a reader disagreed with my readings of the postmodernists but had no criticisms to make of my philosophical conclusions. So, although I want readers to be persuaded by my broad historical narrative of postmodernism, I am aware that this broad interpretation does little to address exegetical debates about the ideas expressed by individual postmodernists in specific texts. I avoid these exegetical debates partly because of the space they would take up and partly because I believe the reception of postmodernism has made exegesis particularly complex and unhelpful. The problem is the canonical status given in some quarters to Derrida and Foucault. Sometimes their word appears to be holy writ and criticism of them heresy. The problem is not that Derrida and Foucault are thought to be important thinkers worth engaging; I obviously think they are. The problem is that the engagement with them becomes a ritual of pious devotion, concerned to receive the beauty and wisdom they offer. There is no critical engagement with either historical questions about the changing nature of their beliefs or philosophical questions about the validity of their arguments. Instead of critically engaging Derrida and Foucault’s ideas, the pious use the gaps and changes in these ideas to offer ad hoc exegetical responses to criticisms of them. As the pious treat Derrida and Foucault’s texts as great books to be mined for beauty and wisdom, so they search these texts for counter-​examples to any criticism leveled at them. Because the postmodernists left significant questions unanswered, there are gaps in their thought. In my opinion the postmodernists rejected general positions while often doing relatively little to specify precise alternatives. The postmodernists challenged foundationalist ideas of knowledge and subjectivity,

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but they did not advocate particular alternatives so much as explore problems, suggest possibilities, and experiment with novel tropes. An adequate exegesis of their work should thus allow for these gaps. Surely it would be a mistake to foist on to them more precise beliefs than they expressed. Surely it is better to recognize that their challenges to foundationalist views of knowledge and subjectivity leave it to us to assess various alternatives. My main aim is thus to develop postfoundationalist analyses of meaning, truth, agency, and freedom. Philosophers leave questions unanswered. It is no criticism of postmodernists to say that they left such gaps. The problems arise when the pious use gaps in Derrida and Foucault’s ideas to sidestep criticisms. Sometimes the pious sidestep criticisms by filling the gaps with different ideas on different occasions. When they elucidate and use postmodernism they associate it with one set of ideas, but when they respond to its critics they associate it with a different set of ideas. For example, when the pious discuss Foucault, they ascribe to him a critique of individual agency, and when they study governmentality, they focus solely on the effects of power on individuals, ignoring the ways individual agents make regimes of power; but when critics argue that Foucault neglected agency, the pious suddenly switch tack and ascribe to him a recognition of agency. The problem here is that the pious ascribe different beliefs to the postmodernists when championing them and when defending them from critics. Sometimes the pious respond to criticisms of the postmodernists by suggesting the gaps are the solution. For example, the pious respond to criticisms of Derrida’s rejection of stable meanings by saying that his work aimed precisely to problematise meaning, and they respond to criticisms of Foucault’s neglect of questions of reason and truth by saying that his work aimed p ­ recisely to show that reason was historical. They forestall criticisms of the postmodernists by implicitly denying that they held any clear beliefs on the relevant issue. The problem here is that the pious step back from ascribing beliefs to the postmodernists not because of the limitations of the historical evidence but to make the postmodernists impervious to certain criticisms. Many philosophers change their beliefs over time, and there is nothing wrong with the postmodernists having done so. Here too problems arise because the pious use the changes in Derrida and Foucault’s beliefs to sidestep criticisms. Sometimes the pious appeal to beliefs Derrida and Foucault expressed at one time to respond to criticisms of the beliefs they expressed at another time, without considering if and how these different beliefs are to be reconciled with one another. For example, when critics complain about Derrida and Foucault’s hostility to the subject in early works such as Of Grammatology and The Order of Things, the pious appeal to their later works, such as “Eating Well” and The

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History of Sexuality, to deny that they were hostile to the subject. The problem here is that the pious cherry pick from ideas that the postmodernists expressed in different texts without giving any serious thought to the historical and philosophical relationships among these ideas and texts. If I have been too harsh on the pious and evoked a straw man, it has been to forestall responses to my arguments that use ad hoc exegesis to sidestep philosophical issues. The gaps and changes in the postmodernists’ beliefs raise complex exegetical questions. Unfortunately, however, their pious followers use the gaps and changes not to engage the exegetical questions but to offer ad hoc responses to critics. Exegetical debates have thus become distracting and unhelpful. What would help is a greater willingness among the pious to use exegesis to address historical and philosophical questions rather than dismiss them. If we want to historicize reason –​as Foucault clearly did –​to what epistemology can we appeal to justify our narratives? If we bring the subject back in –​as Foucault eventually did –​do we or do we not need to accept that people are creative agents who make social practices through their intentional agency? If genealogy precludes archaeological appeals to quasi-​structures that define the thought and practice of an age –​as Foucault later implied it did –​how should we understand aggregate concepts such as “regime of truth”? There are many other, equally compelling questions. The point is: if postfoundationalists are to develop a vibrant research program that others take seriously, they must show less piety to authors and more willingness to engage broad historical and philosophical issues. Although I am mainly interested in the philosophical issues, I inevitably touch on exegetical questions. My implicit exegesis allows for gaps and changes in Derrida and Foucault’s beliefs. I treat them as offering a negative critique of foundationalism and as tentatively exploring various alternatives. More importantly, I will suggest that having initially made their mark through aggressive challenges to reason, diachronic analysis, and subjectivity, they became more sympathetic to historicist and humanist ideas. For example, the chapter on subjectivity takes-​off from Foucault’s early works in which he tried to avoid appeals to intentional agency, but the chapter on critique turns to his later genealogical writings with their historicist orientation, and the chapter on community explores his later ethical writings with their more positive discussions of autonomy and freedom. On my reading, therefore, Foucault set out from a position that was indebted to the structuralist hostility to humanism and historicism but he came in his ethical works to adopt analyses of the individual and freedom that at least overlap with mine, and in his genealogical works to accept a radical historicism very close to mine. Part of me welcomes Derrida and Foucault’s movement towards humanist and historicist ideas.

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I can appeal to them as allies in so far as they came to reject quasi-​structures and formalism. However, part of me wants to note the costs of them and their followers blurring distinctions between their earlier and later views. The main cost is, of course, the encouragement given to ad hoc exegetical responses to critics. 3

The Question of Arrangement

Postmodernism has caused more of a stir than any other recent way of making sense of the world. Postmodernists offer a negative rejection of foundationalism and the ideal of a philosophical language. They adopt a critical suspicion towards representation, knowledge, rationality, and structure. However, because people have to hold beliefs in order to act in the world, the question remains: what beliefs remain after this postmodern suspicion? The more positive side of postmodernism responds to this question with concepts such as différance, trace, genealogy, deconstruction, the Other, and transgression. However, there then arises the question: does a rejection of foundationalism really require the postmodern worldview associated with these concepts? My postfoundational historicism and humanism is an alternative answer to the question: what are we left with after God? It expresses the consequences that I think follow from turning to lived practice in the wake of the metaphysical ideal of a philosophical language. “Postfoundational” refers in part to a broad epistemological position that I and other meaning holists share with postmodernism. As a holist, I too reject pure experience and pure reason. I believe that signs can never have one to one correspondences with their referents. However, my postfoundational epistemology goes beyond this negative critique of metaphysics. I draw on lived practice as a legitimate source of stable meanings and objective knowledge. “Historicism” and “humanism” describe prominent features of the web of beliefs I thus tie to my meaning holism and postfoundational epistemology. The “humanism” arises because I believe that lived practice suggests that humans are agents with a capacity to adopt novel beliefs and actions for reasons of their own. The “historicism” arises because I believe that meaning holism undermines the notion of individual autonomy; individual agency necessarily occurs against the background of historical inheritances that influence it. The ensuing encounter with postmodernism provides a detailed account of postfoundational historicism and humanism. Here I want to say more about lived practice. Metaphysicians usually seek foundations for objective knowledge in something outside human life or in unalterable features of the human

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mind. A postfoundational critique of metaphysics implies that their searches fail. An analysis of objective knowledge must appeal, instead, to human activity, the content of which can change. Lived practice refers to this contingent activity –​the beliefs and actions, quotidian or extraordinary, of which human lives consist. When I appeal to lived practice as a site of philosophical reflection, I suggest that our webs of belief enable us to stabilize meanings, and our comparisons of rival accounts of the world enable us to decide what counts as objective knowledge. Insofar as the content of all practices is contingent, my philosophical arguments, with their appeals to lived practice, cannot lay claim to the universality and certainty of foundationalism. Nonetheless, the absence of universality and certainty does not undermine the validity of these arguments. It implies only that while these arguments are valid for us given our concepts and practices, they might not be valid for others if they held different concepts embedded in different practices. Perhaps critics will object that “valid for us” does not provide the strength of validity needed for knowledge. These critics return us to Derrida. Like Derrida, they are so transfixed by the universality and certainty of metaphysics that in its absence they talk only of the impossibility of doing without it. They neglect to search for other weaker forms of knowledge. What the critics fail to recognize is that we cannot do without weaker forms of knowledge. We cannot avoid making knowledge-​claims even if we are unable to ascribe universality and certainty to them. To live, we must act, and to act, we must accept some beliefs no matter how provisionally. To turn on a light is implicitly to accept beliefs such as “the room is dark”, “moving a switch will cause a light to come on”, and “the light is not deadly”. Further, because our actions commit us to beliefs, they give us good reason to adopt other beliefs that are logically entailed or implied by them. It is because our lives commit us to certain beliefs that lived practice provides a valid base for philosophical reflection. The appeal to lived practice points to a new relationship between philosophy and the other things we hold true. Insofar as metaphysical doctrines base philosophy on things outside our world or on unalterable features of the mind, they imply that philosophical reflection need not depend on other beliefs. These metaphysical ideas suggest that philosophy deals with objects and principles that are given irrespective of historical contexts. They present themselves as an ultimate science, beyond which no advance can be made. In contrast, appeals to lived practice embed philosophical reflection in the particular beliefs that inform our contingent activity. It makes us aware of the contingency of the context that sustains our philosophical beliefs, arguments, and concerns. As a result, meaning holism inspires a postanalytic alternative to analytic philosophy. Analytic philosophers typically study the logical

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relationships among discrete propositions. They ask whether a proposition P does or does not either entail or imply another Q. In contrast, meaning holism implies that propositions have content only in the context of wider webs of belief, so the logical relations that exist among propositions varies with the relevant context.10 Meaning holism suggests that whether any P does or does not entail or imply a Q depends not only on the content of P and Q but thus also on the other propositions one holds true. Any argument of the form “P entails Q” or “P implies Q” can be rebuffed by introducing an appropriate auxiliary hypothesis into the wider web of beliefs in which the argument is made. For meaning holists, arguments and truth-​claims are thus enthymematic and reliant on other beliefs. Meaning holists contextualize philosophy. Postfoundationalism implies that beliefs, arguments, and concerns are embedded in contingent historical settings. Postfoundationalism suggests that philosophical positions can support normative conclusions only in a cumulative and non-​conclusive manner. My encounter with postmodernism reflects this account of the relation of philosophy to other bits of our knowledge. It consists of three distinct parts, dealing respectively with history, philosophy, and ethics. Although these three parts occur in a given order, the order does not reflect an intellectual hierarchy or chain of reasoning. No one part is foundational for the others. Rather, the three parts are interlocking and mutually supportive bits of a web of beliefs. Readers could treat any of them as a point of departure. Readers could move through the parts of Life after God in the order in which they are given, proceeding from the history to the philosophy and on to the ethics. My encounter with postmodernism would then appear as a debate about the nature of modernity and how to respond to it. The historical chapters would establish the shared beliefs and dilemmas in the context of which the ensuing philosophical and ethical debates take place. The historical chapters would also provide genealogical critiques of the postmodern responses to these shared dilemmas, paving the way to the alternative philosophical and ethical positions of my postfoundational historicism and humanism. The chapter on modernity explores the historical background to the shared dilemmas of knowledge and subjectivity that confront many 10

There is no one right way to distinguish analytic and postanalytic philosophy. In focusing on meaning holism, I am placing in the post-​analytic camp philosophers, such as W. V. O. Quine, who are often thought to be quintessentially analytic. For a historically-​minded defence of this placement consider J. Isaac, “Missing Links: W. V. Quine, the Making of ‘Two Dogmas,’ and the Analytic Roots of Postanalytic Philosophy”, History of European Ideas 37 (2011), 267–​79.

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postfoundationalists. I begin by contrasting Foucault’s archaeological approach in The Order of Things with one inspired by my postfoundational historicism and humanism. Thereafter, I deploy my approach to offer a critical reading of The Order of Things and thus an alternative narrative of contemporary thought. Foucault argued that contemporary thought is teetering on the brink of an arational shift from a monolithic modern episteme to a posthumanist one. I argue that contemporary thought consists of the beliefs of diverse agents who are influenced by overlapping and competing traditions, each of which points to different responses to the dilemmas of knowledge and subjectivity. These competing traditions include foundationalism, postmodernism, and a postfoundational historicism and humanism. Different traditions have led postmodernists and others to respond variously to the dilemmas of knowledge and subjectivity. The chapters on structuralism and the avant-​garde locate the postmodernists against the background of these traditions in order to explain why they usually reject stable meanings and why they tend to deny agency as well as autonomy. These chapters are also genealogies of postmodernism. For me, the possibility of genealogical critiques arises from meaning holism. Because philosophical beliefs, arguments, and concerns become persuasive only in particular contexts, a historical narrative can cast doubt on a philosophical position by exhibiting confusions in the relevant context. The chapter on structuralism argues that structural linguistics represented a methodological attempt to forge an objective science, not a reasoned philosophical account of meaning and action. The postmodernists’ rejection of objectivity thus leaves them without a reason for continuing to treat agency as the manifestation of a quasi-​structure. Similarly, the chapter on the avant-​garde suggests that the avant-​garde adopted strategies such as transgression and play as ways of breaking through the bourgeois spectacle to glimpse “the real” –​a truer, harmonious, unalienated reality. The postmodernists’ rejection of “the real” thus leaves them without a reason for promoting these strategies. If readers begin with the historical chapters, they will find genealogies that cast doubt on postmodern responses to the dilemmas of knowledge and subjectivity. The ensuing philosophical and ethical chapters then represent attempts to think through those doubts and develop alternative response to the relevant dilemmas. Readers also might move through Life after God by going from the philosophy to the history and the ethics. My encounter with postmodernism would then appear as a debate about the consequences that follow from taking postfoundationalism seriously. The philosophy would establish grounds for

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adopting both the approach to the human sciences adopted in the historical part and the view of the individual on which the ethical part relies. The chapter on knowledge discusses postmodern responses to that dilemma. I argue that postmodern theories of meaning and truth embody valid critiques of foundationalist modes of thinking, notably structuralism and phenomenology, but these critiques do not sustain the positive positions associated with postmodernism. For example, Derrida is right to reject Husserl’s concept of presence on the grounds that no truths are simply given to consciousness, but whereas Derrida then appears to adopt mysticism or irrationalism, I defend an analysis of objective knowledge based on a practice of comparison between rival sets of theories. Next, the chapter on subjectivity discusses postmodern responses to this other widespread dilemma. Here too I argue that postmodernists offer valid critiques of foundationalist modes of thought, but these critiques do not sustain the positive views associated with postmodernism. For example, Foucault is right to reject autonomy by insisting that individuals cannot enter a realm of authenticity where they are entirely uninfluenced by tradition, but whereas Foucault sometimes appears also to reject agency, I reclaim people’s creativity, intentionality, and rationality. The final philosophical chapter applies my arguments about knowledge and subjectivity to the human sciences. For a start, I use my analyses of meaning and truth to defend alternative textual strategies to those of Barthes and Derrida. I argue that meanings exist only in webs of belief, and webs of belief are necessarily the properties of specific individuals. Talk about “the meaning of a text” is nonsense in so far as it suggests texts have intrinsic meanings. When people study texts, they are historians interested in what texts meant for others. In addition, I use my analyses of creativity and reasoning to defend an alternative social theory to that of Foucault. Recognition of agency implies that human scientists should pay as much attention to how people create, modify, and transform practices as to how practices influence people. Human scientists should shift their attention from epistemes and regimes of power to agency situated against a background of traditions and dilemmas. If readers begin with the philosophical chapters, they will find analyses of knowledge, subjectivity, and the human sciences that differ from the positive views of the postmodernists. The historical chapters use my analysis of the human sciences to provide an alternative account of modern thought to Foucault’s The Order of Things. The historical chapters also show how my philosophy allows me to explain the rise of postmodernism by situating it against the background of structuralism and the avant-​garde. Later, the ethical

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chapters explore the implications of my philosophy, showing how it inspires a cosmopolitan social democracy. Because the three parts of Life after God form a mutually-​supportive inter-​ locking web rather than a unidirectional chain of reasoning, readers could proceed from the part on ethics to those on philosophy and history. My encounter with postmodernism would then appear as a debate among the international left on how to rethink social democracy. From this perspective, the ethical chapters defend moral intuitions that decide which philosophical and historical issues are raised in what ways in the other chapters. The first of the ethical chapters asks: what forms of critique are available to postfoundationalists? I argue that a postfoundational historicism and humanism can sustain the critical power of deconstruction and genealogy. Because meaning holism undermines the idea of pure experience and pure reason, it supports deconstruction. Holists can probe webs of belief to reveal moments when they appeal to given truths and to trace the baneful effects –​oppositions, exclusions, and paradoxes –​that arise from their doing so. Similarly, postfoundational historicism supports genealogies of the delusions of beliefs and ­practices that present themselves as based on given truths. Postfoundational historicists can track the role of chance and power in practices that purport to derive from neutral reasoning and promote autonomy. Postfoundationalists might seem to cut the ground from under their feet. Insofar as postfoundationalists reject the possibility of reason and freedom, they might seem to lack epistemological and normative grounds on which to base a substantive ethic. Some postmodernists happily accept their position is purely critical, lacking any substantive ethic. Their position is, however, foolish. If postfoundationalism cannot sustain a substantive ethic, it loses its critical force, for criticism becomes properly effective only when it points to a better alternative. People have to adopt beliefs in order to act in the world. A purely negative critique leaves people unable to act, or continuing to act as before albeit with greater doubts about the reasonableness of doing so. The final two chapters on ethics consider substantive issues. The chapter on cosmopolitanism examines the extent of people’s moral responsibility. I argue that the postmodern concept of the other expresses a valid critique of some liberal universalisms. However, the other is only a logical possibility; it could never be embodied. Thus, the concept of the other cannot sustain the positive positions that postmodernists sometimes adopt. It cannot sustain identity politics, neither as a resource for pleading the case of special groups, nor as a tool for challenging all conceivable groups. The concept of the other points, instead, to the priority of a cosmopolitan attention to diversity and self-​critique over the question of what common good people should make together.

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Finally, the chapter on community tackles questions about the common good in the context of a prior attention to diversity and self-​critique. I argue that a rejection of autonomy points to a thick view of the self as embedded in community and an ethic of fellowship. Equally, however, prior attention to diversity and self-​critique requires that this fellowship to be an open community respecting the capacity for agency and the irreducibility of difference. If readers begin with the ethical chapters, they will find a defense of critique and community based on cosmopolitan humanism. The historical chapters exemplify a postfoundational mode of critique. They buttress my ethic by exposing confusions in the postmodern alternatives. The philosophical chapters defend prerequisites and corollaries of my ethic. They present the individual as a situated agent. 4

The Question of Style

Postfoundationalism encourages reflection on the relationship of philosophy to history, ethics, and also style. As postmodernists reject pure reason, they eschew the rigorous, logical style associated with analytic philosophy. Instead, they often enact their arguments in histories, literary criticism, and playful texts. The resulting contests of style have generated heated debates. Temperatures rose to a fever when the University of Cambridge debated whether to give Derrida an honorary degree. In May 1992, nineteen analytic philosophers wrote to The Times arguing that Derrida should not be so honored. They pointed out that his influence had been mainly in fields other than philosophy. They suggested that his originality lay in “gimmicks” and “tricks” presented in a style of writing that fails to meet “accepted standards of clarity and rigour” and even “defies comprehension”, eliding issues that if tackled would show his positions to be either false or trivial.11 Derrida responded by arguing that the signatories of the letter ignored the contingency of their particular style of philosophy, presenting it as natural and dismissing all other styles. Elsewhere Derrida pondered at length the question, “Is there a philosophical language?”:

11

The Times, 9 May 1992. For Derrida’s response to the Cambridge affair see J. Derrida, “Honoris Causa: ‘This is also Extremely Funny’”, trans. M. Hobson and C. Johnson, in Points … Interviews 1974–​1994, ed. E. Weber, trans. P. Kamuf et. al. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), pp. 399–​421. In the end, Cambridge gave Derrida the honorary degree.

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I don’t believe that there is “a specifically philosophical writing”, a sole philosophical writing whose purity is always the same and out of reach of all sorts of contaminations. And first of all for this overwhelming reason: philosophy is spoken and written in a natural language, not in an absolutely formalizable and universal language. That said, within this natural language and its uses, certain modes have been forcibly imposed (and there is a relation of force) as philosophical. The modes are multiple, conflictual, inseparable from the philosophical content itself and from its “theses”. A philosophical debate is also a combat in view of imposing discursive modes, demonstrative procedures, rhetorical and pedagogical techniques. Each time philosophy has been opposed, it was also, although not only, by contesting the properly, authentically philosophical character of the other’s discourse.12 The Cambridge affair demonstrates that style is a philosophical issue. Whether people are aware of it or not, their style often reflects their philosophy. The signatories to the letter to The Times defended a style associated with analytic philosophy. Some early analytic philosophers drew on Gottlob Frege and Immanuel Kant sharply to distinguish between the synthetic and analytic. They defined synthetic propositions as ones that are true or false according to whether they are verified empirically. And they defined analytic propositions as ones that are true or false according to whether they can be proved from definitions using only formal logic. Because they saw philosophy as a purely analytic discipline, they concentrated, as I noted earlier, on the logical relations among propositions. The result was the style associated with analytic philosophy. For a start, analytic philosophers prize clarity as a means to specifying concepts and propositions with the exactness needed to identify the logical relations among them. They pursue clarity through precise definitions, the decomposition of concepts into constituent elements, and appeals to fine-​ grained distinctions. In addition, analytic philosophers favor logical symbols and formulae to show how their conclusions follow logically from their premises. They pursue rigor through logical structure, often casting theories in the form of predicate logic. Finally, analytic philosophers generally have a high view of empirical science, believing it pursues the alternative, synthetic route to truth. They regularly attempt to relate their theories to scientific theories while avoiding pronouncing on empirical matters that can be settled only by experiments. 12

J. Derrida, “Is there a Philosophical Language?”, in Points, p. 219.

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Meaning holism casts doubt on the appropriateness of the style associated with analytic philosophy. Because concepts and propositions can have meaning only in the context of webs of belief, the ideals of clarity and rigor are somewhat illusory. No matter what distinctions philosophers draw, and no matter how logical a structure they deploy, they cannot give arguments and propositions validity outside of particular contexts. Meaning holism thus prompts the suspicion that the constant dissection of concepts using finer and finer distinctions descends into futile casuistry. Derrida adopted a different style from analytic philosophy partly because he believed that concepts are inherently imprecise. “Analysis” refers to various techniques by which philosophers try to pin down propositions and concepts to give them fixed content. As Derrida rejected the possibility of pure linguistic identities, he showed little interest in these techniques. Derrida’s own style included techniques for revealing and casting doubt on assumptions about pure linguistic identities. Some of the “gimmicks” and “tricks” referred to in the letter to The Times were ways of challenging implicit appeals to a philosophical language. Derrida probed the linguistic construction of texts to show –​or, dare I say, to create –​slippages and instabilities in their meanings. His style consisted of playful attempts to reveal –​or, dare I say, forceful efforts to impose –​ the multiple, plausible meanings of texts by looking at the origins, ambiguities, and echoes of the words in them. In addition, because Derrida believed that meanings are necessarily vague and unstable, he challenged the use of predicate logic and other modes of argumentation that take propositional forms. His style included a tendency to scrutinize the protocols of these arguments, often by paying attention to what those who make them regard as marginal material. He used performative modes of argument in which positions are enacted, not defended in a series of propositions. Finally, because Derrida challenged stable meanings and propositional arguments, he was suspicious of the neutrality of scientific claims to truth. He introduced the technical philosophical terminology of deconstruction as “prior to” those of “fields of science” and so as tools with which to interrogate science.13 The terminology of deconstruction constitutes the quasi-​metaphysics by which Derrida tried to avoid metaphysics while allowing for the impossibility of ever doing so. Although meaning holists share Derrida’s belief in the inherent imprecision of concepts, they often suggest that practices, narratives, and beliefs give a contextual stability to concepts. Meaning holists replace Derrida’s

13

J. Derrida, “Tympan”, in Margins of Philosophy, trans. A. Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), p. xx.

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quasi-​metaphysics with an idea of contextual stability, and this idea renders otiose many of the leading features of his style. Meaning holism prompts studies of the local practices and reasoning by which particular people create stable meanings. It suggests that there are no meanings outside the contexts people create. As such, holists might worry that Derrida’s style relies on a quasi-​metaphysical reification of textual meaning. When Derrida probes the linguistic construction of texts, he treats texts as if they or language had meanings in themselves. He points to slippages and protocols as if they are intrinsic to texts or language. He treats texts as quasi-​metaphysical entities that have intrinsic meanings. Given that texts do not have intrinsic meanings, however, holists might ask: for whom do the slippages and protocols that Derrida highlights exist? Derrida did not do the work needed to show that specific authors and readers understood texts as he describes them. Even when he emphasized the historical nature of philosophy, he treated history not as a narrative about specific authors and readers, but as “one great discourse … immersed in a reserve of language”.14 Instead of narrating the contingent activity of people, he probed what seems to be a quasi-​metaphysical concept of language. Thus, because meaning holists reject his quasi-​metaphysical concept of language, they might consider his style to be less a way of exposing assumptions about pure linguistic identities than a way of forcefully imposing such assumptions on texts. Meaning holism encourages a style that I will call narrative explication. To begin, holists ascribe analysis a role in philosophy. Because they allow that concepts can acquire stability in webs of beliefs, they can use analysis to explore the grammar of such webs. Analysis reveals the content, relationships, and implications of clusters of concepts. It provides techniques for elucidating and defending positive positions, including meaning holism itself. However, although holists can defend philosophical positions using analysis, they share Derrida’s skepticism about pure linguistic entities. Analytic philosophers can appear to be competing in a game of one-​upmanship based on pursuing finer and finer distinctions and classifications. They can seem to hope to define propositions and concepts with such precision that their meanings will become transparent independently of all unstated background theories. Holists reject any such hope. In their view, no matter how many distinctions we draw, and no matter how many of our theories we make explicit, the concepts of concern to us, will still gain meaning only when situated in a wider web of

14

J. Derrida, “The Supplement of Copula: Philosophy before Linguistics”, in Margins of Philosophy, p. 177.

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beliefs. Because holists reject the hope of an entirely transparent concept, they rarely treat analysis as having intrinsic value. On the contrary, they suggest that the pertinent issue is whether or not an analysis is adequately detailed for the concepts and issues being considered. When concepts are vague, analyses of them should be vague in similar respects. Holists try to fit their analyses to the vagueness of concepts rather than pursuing perfect transparency, as do some analytic philosophers, or forcing slippages and instabilities on texts, as does Derrida. For meaning holists, analysis cannot end with a pure concept. There is always room for further dissection through more refined analysis, additional distinctions, and greater elaboration of pertinent theories. The only way to avoid an infinite regress is to bring analysis to a halt. Typically, we will seek to end an analysis either when concepts become vague or when further specification of concepts has no significant pay-​off for the topics being discussed. When analysis comes to an end, we reach the bedrock of our beliefs and concepts. Clearly, we cannot elucidate or justify this bedrock using analysis. Instead, meaning holists can turn to narratives to locate this bedrock, and so their analysis, in a wider web of beliefs and its historical background. Narratives can explain why we stand where we do. They can show why our bedrock lies where it does. Whereas analyses focus on the logical relations among concepts, narratives explicate beliefs by pointing to conditional connections. Conditional connections are neither necessary nor arbitrary. Rather, they exist when beliefs reflect, develop, or modify themes that occur in one another. All beliefs give intimations of associated ideas. These ideas may or may not be picked up by people who hold that belief. If these other ideas are picked up, they constitute themes connecting the relevant beliefs. Some themes enable us to make sense of beliefs by fitting them together as a web. Other themes enable us to make sense of webs of belief by locating them in historical traditions. For example, a rejection of the possibility of a philosophical language in which signs have direct relationships to their referents does not entail that one puts concepts under erasure.15 Nonetheless, we can see that putting a concept under erasure might act as a way to evoke it while ascribing to it a deliberate otherness that challenges the idea of a philosophical language. In general, because holists reject the possibility of foundations outside of particular webs of belief, their 15

Likewise, meaning holism need not lead to narrative explication. Wittgenstein’s cultural pessimism and aestheticism, with its Spenglerian roots, inspired him, for example, to adopt a sparse, aphoristic style as expressed in his belief that: “In art it is hard to say anything as good as saying nothing”. See L. Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, trans. P. Winch (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980), 3e.

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style might locate their analyses in narratives that elucidate the bedrock on which these analyses depend. Instead of grounding their analyses in logic itself, as do some analytic philosophers, or retreating into performances, as at times Derrida did, holists might situate their analyses in narratives. Narratives embed analyses in broader webs of belief. It might be argued, however, that they do not justify those webs. Critics might complain that situating arguments in narratives does not give other people any reason to accept the arguments. How can meaning holists justify the bedrock of their narratives and analyses? For a start, they can argue that this question asks for a kind of justification and certainty that is not possible.16 Because beliefs gain content only in webs, people can reject any piece of evidence and any reason if they make suitable amendments elsewhere in their web of beliefs. No belief can ever be treated as immutable or absolutely certain. All beliefs are in principle open to revision. In addition, holists might go on to justify the bedrock by appeals to everyday concepts and practices. Whenever people act in the world, they commit themselves, no matter how tentatively, to the beliefs and concepts embedded in their actions. Philosophical argument can get going, therefore, by appealing to the concepts on which people rely in their lives. To show that the grammar of a set of concepts entails certain beliefs is to show that people should accept those beliefs if they rely on those concepts. Even if the relevant practices and sets of concepts are specialized ones, people still commit themselves to them in their everyday lives insofar as they participate in the practices or act on the concepts. So, instead of privileging either empirical science or the technical terms of deconstruction, holists might relate their analyses and narratives to the concepts that inform lived practices. 5

Conclusion

Just as meaning holism suggests that philosophical, historical, and ethical beliefs are mutually dependent, so it suggests that questions of style relate to history and ethics as well as philosophy. Historically, many present-​day philosophical styles arose against the background of a widespread loss of faith in reason and progress at the turn of the nineteenth century. The characteristic style of analytic philosophy emerged during a general shift from developmental narratives elaborated around principles of reason and progress to

16 L. Wittgenstein, On Certainty, trans. D. Paul and G. Anscombe (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1974).

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more atomistic and analytic modes of inquiry.17 Similarly, Derrida’s style drew on an avant-​garde tradition that emerged at the same time but placed greater emphasis on subversion and self-​reflexivity. The avant-​garde relied on playfulness, fragmentation, and collage to probe and disrupt modes of representation, including language. Finally, narrative explication reflects a historicist tradition that seeks to replace old narratives of continuity, reason, and progress with new ones of dispersal, difference, and discontinuity. Consider now the relation of style to ethics. It is widely recognized that postfoundational styles sustain critiques of unexamined assumptions and shared conventions. It is less widely recognized that many postfoundational styles have a confessional quality. Postfoundationalists confess to the reader that their arguments lack secure foundations. Derrida’s style exhibits a tortured concern to acknowledge its dependence on quasi-​metaphysics. It confesses in its own marks to the sins he commits in using language and making metaphysical gestures. The confessional nature of Derrida’s style appears in his putting concepts under erasure, the complex circumlocutions and syntax of his work, and above all, his deliberate elusiveness. Because holists place greater emphasis on the ability of webs of belief to stabilize concepts, they do not take their use of such concepts to be a sin in the way Derrida did. Nonetheless, holists might adopt a different mode of confession. They might confess to the particular webs of belief that they depend on to give stability to their concepts. Their narratives might act as ways of owning up to the particular historical traditions against the background of which they have reached their beliefs. Their narratives might confess, through their plots, the local contexts of their concerns and their arguments. The question of style thus provides yet another perspective on the question of arrangement. The chapters on ethics and history appear as the narrative explications of a meaning holist. They explicate my philosophical arguments by tying them into a wider web of beliefs and by locating this wider web of beliefs against the background of specific traditions and dilemmas. I confess to the local contexts of my arguments by situating them against the background of these traditions and concerns. 17

W. Everdell, The First Moderns (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997).

pa rt 1 History

∵

chapter 2

On Modernity Philosophers often think of their discipline as fundamental and themselves as underlaborers leveling the ground on which others build. Postfoundationalism suggests, in contrast, that all beliefs –​philosophical, historical, ethical, and so forth –​form a mutually-​supporting web. One implication of postfoundationalism is, therefore, that people can challenge a philosophical argument by shifting attention to the other beliefs that support it. Postmodernists often engage other philosophers by shifting focus. They shift from formal arguments based on predicate logic to performances and historical narratives. A failure to appreciate the place of philosophical beliefs in wider webs of belief can lead ­postmodernists and their critics to talk past one another. Sometimes, postmodernists appear too satisfied with the role of clever children refusing to play a party game they think is pointless. To reject all reasoned debate as bunkum and an arbitrary imposition of power is, after all, still to express an opinion, and if an opinion is to carry weight, it must be one for which reasons are given. Equally, though, other philosophers are too prone to dismiss postmodernists as spoilt, sulking children. It is, after all, a bit much to expect postmodernists to argue against other philosophies in terms that presuppose those philosophies. For postfoundationalists, philosophical debate occurs in specific historical contexts. One way to encounter postmodernism is thus through narratives of modern thought. What is modern thought? What place do postmodernism, historicism, and humanism occupy in it? Although postmodernists often expound the virtues of self-​reflexivity, there are as far as I know no attempts to provide a postmodern analysis of postmodernism. The nearest to an attempt to do so is Michel Foucault’s The Order of Things.1 Foucault argued that the human sciences and their humanist historicism derive from an arbitrary episteme. He claimed that humanism is the product of a particular semiotic code governing modern thought, and it will soon disappear in an arational epistemic break. Foucault pointed to signs of this impending epistemic break in structuralist counter-​sciences that focus on impersonal structures rather than Man. But he also distanced himself from structuralism by denying that it had “at last accomplished the old attempt to be truly scientific”.2 Foucault thus set 1 M. Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (London: Tavistock Publishers, 1970). 2 Foucault, Order of Things, p. 373.

© Mark Bevir, 2022 | DOI:10.1163/9789004513556_003

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the scene for the triumphant rise in the wake of Man of something like poststructuralism and postmodernism. In this chapter, I begin by briefly discussing strengths and weaknesses in Foucault’s archaeological approach from the perspective of my postfoundational historicism and humanism. Although this discussion raises philosophical issues, I merely assert my views, leaving a defense of them for the philosophical chapters. The point of this chapter is to use my discussion of Foucault’s archaeological approach to develop an alternative history of modern thought that sets the scene for the next two chapters. I argue that modern thought generated dilemmas of knowledge and subjectivity. One way to characterize modern thought is by identifying varying traditions that prompt different responses to these dilemmas. In the next two chapters, I locate the postmodernists against the background of two such traditions –​structuralism and the avant-​garde –​in order to explore their responses to these dilemmas. 1

Archaeology or History

The Order of Things elucidates the nature of the modern human sciences through an intellectual history beginning in the late seventeenth century. Foucault argues that the human sciences are constructed around a concept of Man as subject and object. He proclaims the death of Man so conceived. Foucault argues that the modern episteme confronts philosophical difficulties resembling those later raised by Jacques Derrida’s critique of metaphysics. Man embodies ideas of truth and freedom to which postmodernists are typically hostile. Foucault elucidates the content of the modern episteme –​the human sciences, Man as subject and object –​by appealing to a distinct concept of representation on which he alleges it is based. He relies here on an archaeological approach that purports to analyze the thought of an era as the product of core rules of signification and concept formation. Foucault explicitly contrasts his archaeological approach with a humanist historicism. His approach extravagantly avoids appeals to agents trying to make sense of their world. It purports, instead, to uncover the epistemes defining the thought of given epochs. An episteme is an historical a priori, an arbitrary set of concepts defined by their relations to one another. Foucault is skeptical of the possibility of language referring to the world and so the possibility of justified knowledge. Thus, epistemes are historical a prioris in that their concepts arbitrarily construct the world; concepts do not reflect objects in the world. Foucault is also skeptical of the idea that people are creative and rational agents. Thus, epistemes are historical a prioris in that their concepts

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decide what individuals can think; concepts are not products of the reasoning of particular individuals. Humanists believe that people are agents capable of making choices for reasons that make sense to them. They need not insist that people make choices using a pure reason uninfluenced by society. On the contrary, postfoundational humanists will accept that individuals reason only against the background of particular historical contexts. These humanists will find two main strengths in Foucault’s approach, both of which reflect his emphasis on the influence of historical contexts on individual reasoning. The first strength of his archaeological approach is a rejection of pure facts and pure reason. Nothing is present to consciousness as an independent and certain fact. All facts are constructed at least in part by theories. Thus, Foucault is right to insist that theories play a role in constructing experiences of the world. Historians should recognize that all concepts are in part theoretical constructs. To experience anything as an object, people have to categorize and interpret it using a particular set of categories. Man –​conceived as the subject of the human sciences –​cannot be present to consciousness as a product of pure experience or pure reason. Man must be in part a theoretical construct. The concept of Man changes through history along with people’s broader understanding of the world. Nonetheless, the changing nature of the concept of Man does not imply, as Foucault concludes, that Man is an arbitrary product of an arational episteme. The second strength of Foucault’s archaeological approach is his rejection of autonomy. People exercise their agency only against historical backgrounds that influence them. Thus, Foucault is right to insist that something like an episteme helps to explain people’s beliefs. Historians should recognize that people always reach the beliefs they do under the influence of a particular historical context. Further, the intellectual background to an individual’s beliefs consists of concepts with certain relations to one another. (In my view, however, these relations exist not because Foucault is right in his semantics, but because all webs of belief exhibit these relations and epistemes are abstractions from the webs of beliefs of individuals.) Historians should accept that there is movement from epoch to epoch, with each epoch being characterized by a dominant set of ideas. Nonetheless, they need not conclude, as Foucault does, that epistemes are monoliths that fix or limit the beliefs of individuals. From the perspective of a postfoundational historicism and humanism, the main weaknesses of Foucault’s archaeological approach arise from the exaggerated nature of his rejections of objective knowledge and human agency. For a start, to deny the existence of pure facts and pure reason is not to deny that people can have justified knowledge of an external reality. The first weakness of Foucault’s approach is, therefore, his hostility to the idea that knowledge

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refers to the world. He is wrong to divorce accounts of the world from experiences of the world. He is wrong to say, “we must not seek to construe these [concepts] as objects that imposed themselves from outside, as though by their own weight and as a result of some autonomous pressure, upon a body of learning”.3 People’s encounters with the world can act as prompts to their ideas. People experience the world even if they do so partly through the theories they hold. Historians should treat ideas not as arbitrary concepts, but as people’s attempts to comprehend the world and find their way around it. The concept of Man is a theoretically constructed object, but it is constructed as part of a cluster of theories by which people attempt to make sense of a world in which they act. The concept of Man is partly a product of people’s attempts to make sense of their encounters with the world. A second weakness of Foucault’s archaeological approach is his neglect of the possibility of reasonable knowledge. He is wrong to imply that beliefs are arational, with successive epistemes generating incommensurable concepts. Historians should adopt an account of justified knowledge as based on comparisons among rival webs of belief. Historians can compare webs of belief to ask which is a better account of the world. They can judge whether a particular shift of ideas brought an epistemic gain. The concept of Man changes as people modify their view of the world in response to their interactions with it, and the changes may allow for historians comparing earlier and later beliefs. Far from being an arbitrary product of a particular episteme, Man might be an object of which people are acquiring reasonable knowledge. To deny the possibility of people escaping their social backgrounds is not to deny that people can act creatively for reasons that make sense to them. The third weakness of Foucault’s archaeological approach is, therefore, his rejection of agency. People can act creatively in ways that are neither fixed nor strictly limited by their historical contexts. People can break out of epistemes. Foucault is wrong to insist that “in any given culture and at any given moment, there is always only one episteme that defines the conditions of possibility of all knowledge”.4 The thought of an era consists of varying perspectives that need not be reducible to a monolithic structure. Historians should record conscious heterodoxy as it appears in competing outlooks and partial breaks within an era. A final weakness of Foucault’s archaeological approach is his neglect of human reason. People can decide to do things for reasons that make sense to

3 Foucault, Order of Things, p. 252. 4 Foucault, Order of Things, p. 168.

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them from their standpoint. Thus, Foucault is wrong to represent the history of ideas as a succession of arbitrary epistemes the content of which derives from relations among core semiotic concepts. He is wrong to describe the thought of an era as determined by “rules that come into play in the very existence of such discourse”.5 The thought of an era is the product of people adopting ideas for reasons that make sense to them from their perspectives. Foucault’s archaeology had to present epistemes solely “in terms of conditions and a prioris established in time”, not “by describing the state of knowledge that preceded it and what it has provided by way of –​as we say –​‘original contributions’”.6 In contrast, historians should explain change as a product of individuals exercising their local reason. Foucault’s archaeology had to dismiss “quasi-​continuity on the level of ideas and themes” as “a surface appearance” where “the system of positivities was transformed in a wholesale fashion”.7 In contrast, historians should allow that change goes along with continuity. The strengths and weaknesses of Foucault’s archaeology suggest a framework for analyzing his account of the human sciences. Postfoundational humanists and historicists might engage his archaeologies in the following ways. 1. Historians might begin by exploring the way in which an episteme came into being. Foucault ignored this question of beginnings because he could not account for change. He wrote only of arational breaks. In contrast, historians might explain the emergence of an episteme by examining the reasons people had for adopting its characteristic ideas. 2. Next historians might explore the content of an episteme to highlight the strengths of Foucault’s approach. They might show that much of the thought of an era fits a pattern resembling Foucault’s description of the episteme. 3. Historians will insist, however, that the patterns they uncover derive not from semiotic codes but the shared beliefs of numerous individuals. 4. Next historians might consider the similarities between an episteme and the one it replaced. In doing so, they might compare the epistemes to see whether the change from one to the other brought epistemic growth. Foucault could not do this because he defined epistemes as incommensurable and arational. 5. From the historian’s perspective, an episteme is merely the dominant beliefs of an era. Thus, they might mention competing outlooks and partial breaks within an era. Whereas Foucault tried to reduce the thought 5 Foucault, Order of Things, p. xiv. 6 Foucault, Order of Things, p. 208. 7 Foucault, Order of Things, p. xxii.

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6.

of each era to a single static episteme, historians might present an episteme as a set of dominant beliefs that faced challenges and was subject to change. Historians might conclude by asking why an episteme declined in prestige. Foucault ignored this question because he had no theory of change. In contrast, historians can explain the demise of epistemes by examining the reasons individuals had for rejecting their characteristic themes.

2

The Human Sciences

Foucault’s aim in The Order of Things was to provide an archaeology of the human sciences. He argued that the human sciences arose only in the Modern episteme. They could not have appeared earlier because they study Man as a Subject –​a being who represents the world to himself –​and this concept of Man is a product of the Modern episteme. However, Foucault’s account of Man and the human sciences exhibits the strengths and weaknesses of his archaeological method. A humanist historian might apply the six-​point framework outlined above to assess The Order of Things. 1. The first issue is Foucault’s account of the origins of Man and the human sciences. Foucault argued that Man is a product of a semiotic code that is an historical a priori of the Modern episteme. He argued that the modern episteme arose in an arational and inexplicable break with its Classical predecessor. In contrast, humanist historicism suggests that people’s view of the nature and capacities of human beings develops as part of an explicable history of ideas. Man is the view of the nature and capacities of human beings that arose as this explicable historical process entered the Modern era. Although I cannot here give sufficient weight to the rival traditions of each era, I can provide the outline of a history of the ways people have conceived of human beings and the human sciences. I begin, as does The Order of Things, in the Renaissance. The dominant view among Renaissance intellectuals was that humans were part of a single web of signatures and resemblances. Humans embodied an Idea. This Idea appeared in the visible marks that God had placed on them, and it linked them to the great chain of being through their similarities to other objects. The larger order of things defined the purpose of the individual. People were to be what God had made them. However, Renaissance humanists in particular argued that although humans were part of an unchanging

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order, they had an active faculty by which to influence their fate.8 Renaissance humanists emphasized the special dignity of humans as free beings. Free will was as prominent as the immortality of the soul among the special properties of humans. Pico della Mirandola conveyed the importance of free will in the words that he gave to God at the start of his famous Oration: Neither a fixed abode nor a form that is thine alone nor any function peculiar to thyself have we given thee, Adam, to the end that according to thy longing and according to thy judgment thou mayest have and possess what abode, and form, and what functions thou thyself shalt desire. The nature of all other beings is limited and constrained within the bounds of laws prescribed by Us. Thou, constrained by no limits, in accordance with thine own free will, in whose hand We have placed thee, shalt ordain for thyself the limits of thy nature.9 Because humans had free will, they could improve themselves. Although reflection on the power of fortune sometimes inspired a pessimistic mood among Renaissance humanists, their dominant conviction was that individuals could begin to master their fate through the exercise of virtue. A stress on the pursuit of excellence through virtue led civic humanists to shift the locus of morality from a divine order to the social requirements of the good life. They argued that civic freedom rested on an independent citizenry willing to put the common good before factional interests. Many Renaissance humanists championed a return to antiquity because they thought the Greeks and Romans had possessed a free spirit which was lost during the Middle Ages.10 This belief in the model of antiquity led them to study history. However, while Renaissance philologists and antiquarians developed a fairly critical approach to their sources, the pursuit of history generally remained a literary activity concerned primarily with morals to be drawn from uncritical readings of past texts. Renaissance historians offered narrative chains of deeds and their consequences leading to moral conclusions. 8

Q. Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), Vol. 1: The Renaissance. 9 Pico della Mirandola, “Oration on the Dignity of Man”, trans. E. Forbes, in E. Cassier, P. Kristeller, and J. Randall Jr., eds., The Renaissance Philosophy of Man: Petrarca, Valla, Ficino, Pico, Pomponazzi, Vives (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948), pp. 224–​25. 10 Skinner, Foundations, vol. 1; and D. Kelley, Foundations of Modern Historical Scholarship: Language, Law, and History in the French Renaissance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1970).

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The Classical era ushered in a different view of the nature and capacities of human beings. Individuals were divorced from nature and society in a way they rarely were before. The individual subject lay outside the world as object. People were no longer connected to the world by resemblances that instantiated the order of things. Further, because the order of things was lifeless, ­individuals could no longer take their purpose from it., but had instead to identify their purpose using their reason. Human reason was to uncover a purpose ordained by God or perhaps to construct a purpose for itself. The nature of human beings derived from a reason within them, not from their place in the order of things. This view of human beings inspired an instrumental stance towards the rest of nature. Individuals used the world to discover and realize their purpose; the world did not define their purpose for them. Further, individuals had identities that distinguished them from one another in a way they did not in the Renaissance. Thus a new concept of “society” emerged in the Classical era. In the sixteenth century, the word “society” had referred to fellowship as an active possession of individuals. On a few, rare occasions “society” had a more objective sense, as in “Society of Jesus”; but even then it referred to particular groups formed by association for distinct reasons. During the seventeenth century, the word “society” began to be used to refer to objective institutions in which a group of people lived and even to the abstract idea of any such institutions. Society was objectified along with nature so that it became external to the individual. Thinkers conceived of individuals as standing alone in a state of nature, lacking fellowship and association. Although a civic humanism derived from the Renaissance continued to attract some intellectuals, this Classical worldview inspired new views of human nature and human freedom.11 In the Classical era, individuals often appeared as pre-​social beings possessing a fixed nature and living in a mechanical universe. Freedom was more individual than civic in nature, and the product of an act of reason more than an act of will. Free individuals were those who used reason to obtain an instrumental control over the outer world and their own nature. They used reason to act in accord with their own rational purposes and so arguably God’s will. Early in the Classical age, the new empiricism wrought a transformation in the writing of history. Francis Bacon and other empiricists inherited much of the tradition of the Renaissance humanists. They saw history as a literary activity with a practical moral purpose. However, their commitment to an empirical science led them to insist on the need to recount the history factually before 11

J. Pocock. The Machiavellian Moment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975).

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erecting a moral meaning on it. Bacon argued that an empirical study of actual lives provided the basis for a science of human nature. The new empiricists typically wrote much less idealized accounts of past lives and actions than had Renaissance scholars. Also, early in the Classical age, skepticism threatened the very idea of history. René Descartes and others introduced stringent criteria for what could count as knowledge partly in order to challenge the hermetic belief in natural magic that had flourished during the Renaissance. Many classical philosophers identified knowledge with mathematical certainty, relegating history to the problematic realm of hearsay. Thomas Hobbes and others introduced a new science to replace the history of the humanists. These atomists tried to uncover universal laws of human nature and society as deductions from analyses of the pre-​social individual. The work of John Locke and Isaac Newton dramatically altered Classical thought. A Newtonian science studying systems of motion governed by impersonal forces became increasingly popular as a model for the human sciences. Adam Smith and the theorists of the Scottish Enlightenment strove to develop a new science of society in place of both the narratives of the Renaissance humanists and the deductive theories of the atomists. They described social systems as products of interactions among different forces, including manners and customs, civic and economic practices, and constitutions. Romanticism inaugurated yet another new view of the nature and capacities of human beings, a view that has dominated the Modern era. Humans appeared as living beings in a historical order. Man and the universe were not united in a single rational order. Rather, the inorganic realm was alive and so able to create an order for itself in a way the organic realm could not. The nature and purpose of humans came from the creativity of their inner selves. Modern thinkers often suggested that the imagination provided humans with resources to challenge what they saw as the oppressive effects of a disengaged instrumental rationality. The romantic movement pitted feeling and imagination against the Classical concern with reason and order. Romantics valued the unique lines of a living nature above the formal symmetries of the Classical era. Although the traditions of the Renaissance and the Classical era continued to attract some support, the Modern era witnessed a change in the dominant view of human nature and freedom. Modern Man came into being. Modern Man is defined by his creativity as much as his rationality, his ability to realize his unique nature as much as an ability to comprehend and control the world about him. The Modern era retained the individualism of the Classical age, but the identity of the individual now came less from universal reason than a unique personal set of feelings. Two features define this new Modern view of the individual. First, Man has inner depths. Individuals

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have unique personalities based on deep emotions and dispositions. They have inner natures that can be expressed or repressed, fulfilled or unrealized. Second, Man has a creative and imaginative faculty. Individuals create their own nature and so the world around them by expressing their inner feelings and thoughts in their actions. People’s originality enables them to bring something new into being, going beyond all previous models and all previous sets of rules. Freedom thus consists in expressing one’s unique being and realizing oneself. The good of individuals consists in being true to their inner selves. To live well is to live creatively in accord with one’s own unique nature. Beginning with Johann Gottfried von Herder, modern thinkers criticized eighteenth-​century philosophers of history for treating the past as if it were the present. They complained that their predecessors had ignored the historical contexts of customs, practices, and institutions.12 The Moderns took a non-​mechanistic view of individuals, society, and culture as historical products of Man’s creative endeavors. Although the traditions of the Renaissance and the Classical era continued to attract some support, the Modern era thus witnessed a change in the dominant view of how to study human beings and their activities. The Modern human sciences came into being. Whereas sciences such as biology and to some extent economics studied the way in which Man sustained himself as a living being, the human sciences studied the creative activity of Man. The human sciences studied Man as a being who created his world through imagination. The study of human nature took the form of a psychology that focused on the inner depths of individuals and their unique personal biographies. The study of society took the form of a sociology that concentrated on the evolution of different social formations out of human activity. The study of art focused on the genius of the author, or even the genius of a whole community as it appeared in things such as folk tales and language. 2. My preceding account of the emergence of Man and the human sciences suggests that Foucault captured important features of Modern thought. Foucault wrote of “the modern themes of an individual who lives, speaks, and works in accordance with the laws of an economics, a philology, and a biology, but who also, by a sort of internal torsion and overlapping, has acquired the right, through the interplay of those very laws, to know them and to subject them to total clarification”.13 He argued that whereas the Classical episteme located humans outside a nature that they came to know through a process of naming and classifying, the Modern episteme postulates Man as both the 12

P. Reill, The German Enlightenment and the Rise of Historicism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975). 13 Foucault, Order of Things, p. 310.

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subject and object of knowledge. In the Classical episteme, humans came to know things by representing them, the object was linked to the subject by discourse, and language tied humans to their representations of things. In the Modern episteme, humans come to know things because of the way they live, labor, and speak, so the object is linked to the subject by the concept of Man as a living, laboring, and speaking being. In the Modern episteme, Man as object produces Man as a subject. It is important to recognize that Foucault defined Man as humans conceived as beings who have knowledge and can be studied as such. Thus, when he argued that Man did not exist prior to the Modern episteme, he meant only that humans conceived as the possessors of knowledge were not earlier also themselves objects of knowledge. His concern with semiotic codes led him to define Man in restricted epistemological terms as a being who represents the world to himself and can be studied as such. In contrast, my focus on the romantic basis of much modern thought suggests a broader view of Man. My account emphasizes that Man is a being who possesses inner depths and creative imagination; Man is an autonomous individual for whom freedom consists in the expression of a unique pre-​social nature. According to Foucault, the empirical sciences of economics, biology, and philology study the way Man as object becomes Man as subject. They ask how Man goes from being a part of nature to a knower of nature. The empirical sciences explore the ways in which labor, life, and language create individuals who can attach value to things, perceive things, and describe things. In contrast, philosophy and the human sciences study Man as subject. Philosophy explores what it is to have knowledge. The human sciences explore the particular values, perceptions, and descriptions with which people have represented the world they live in to themselves. For Foucault, therefore, the human sciences occupy three epistemological regions corresponding to the empirical sciences. Psychology corresponds to biology: as biology takes Man as a living being, so psychology studies the ways this living being represents the world in which he lives. Sociology corresponds to economics: as economics considers Man as a laboring being, so sociology studies the ways in which this laboring being represents the society in which he labors. Literary analysis corresponds to philology: as philology considers Man as the user of language, so literary analysis studies the texts that this user of language leaves behind. The human sciences thus deal with the representations that Man makes of the world. Each of them characteristically does so in terms of a model taken from the empirical science to which it corresponds. Psychology typically deploys a biological language of functions regulated by norms. Sociology typically relies on an economic language of conflicts conducted according to rules. Literary analysis

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typically uses a philological language of meanings located in systems of signs. Nonetheless, attempts can be made to base any one of the human sciences on any of the models taken from the empirical sciences. Foucault argued here that the methodological controversies that constantly bedevil the human sciences are products of their particular location in the Modern episteme. It is because any one of them can make use of the model associated with any other that method has been a subject of intense debate. Foucault believed that both philosophy and the human sciences study the subjective aspects of Man. They look at the meanings that Man’s activities have for him, not at his activities as such. The human sciences differ from philosophy in that they focus on the Other as the source of Man’s representations. Philosophy studies knowledge and meaning as products of a reflective and rational consciousness. The human sciences study knowledge and meaning as products of the unconscious, social forces, and language. In Foucault’s view, the human sciences are thus inherently critical of Man’s self-​consciousness. The human sciences demystify representations by showing they come from sources excluded from conscious self-​understanding. The human sciences concern the arational unthought origins of human knowledge in norms, rules, and systems of signs. Here Foucault’s belief in semiotic codes led him to define the Modern human sciences as necessarily concerned with the unthought origins of human activity. His archaeological approach committed him to defining the human sciences in terms of a structural relationship to other epistemological areas in a Modern episteme. As he explained, “it is not Man who constitutes them [the human sciences] and provides them with a specific domain; it is the general arrangement of the episteme that provides them with a site, summons them, and establishes them –​thus enabling them to constitute man as their object”.14 In contrast, a concept of Man as a creative and imaginative being with inner depths suggests a broader view of the Modern human sciences. The human sciences are defined by their object. They study the representations that Man produces through creative and imaginative activity. Sometimes they appeal to the unthought, but sometimes they appeal to the conscious mind. 3. My broad understanding of Man and the human sciences leads to a revision of Foucault’s account of the Modern predicament. Foucault’s analysis of the human sciences was also a critique of them. He described the human sciences as premised on a concept of Man of which he was critical. He argued that Man is not a fixed object of which scholars gain knowledge, but rather the product of an arational episteme. 14 Foucault, Order of Things, p. 364.

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In a sense Man did indeed arise only as part of the beliefs of the Modern era. The Modern concept of human nature owes much to the romantic concern with life and history, imagination and the unique, and above all the creative nature of the will. However, there is also a sense in which Man is the most recent expression of people’s constantly developing view of the nature and capacities of human beings. Foucault’s prophecy of the death of Man is thus highly ambiguous. Few people would disagree if he meant only that the Modern understanding of human beings –​their nature and capacities –​might change. But the drama and notoriety of his prophecy derive from the implication that the very idea of humans beings having a nature and capacities will disappear. This implication makes sense only if we assume that the very idea of ourselves as beings with certain capacities exists only as a product of the semiotic code that structures a Modern episteme. And this assumption makes sense only given a strong version of the thesis that concepts are defined wholly by their opposition to other concepts in a synchronic system. If we reject this view of concepts, as we should, then the fact that our view of our nature and capacities might change will not lead us to conclude that any such change must entail the demise of the very idea of human beings having a nature and capacities. Man might die; human beings will only change. Foucault argued that the concept of Man is the arbitrary product of an arational episteme and also an irredeemably confused concept. His critique focused on the epistemological issue raised by his idea that Man is the subject and object of knowledge. The question is: how can an empirical being formed by life, labor and language come to have knowledge of the world? To have knowledge of the world, people must distinguish truth from falsity, so they must partake in a transcendental reason that provides critical standards by which to do so. But the question then is: how can an empirical being shaped by biological, economic, and linguistic forces adopt a transcendental stance? Immanuel Kant responded to this latter question by appealing to an analytic of human finitude. Kant argued that the things that limit knowledge –​time and space –​also make it possible. According to Foucault, however, Kant failed adequately to define the relationship between Man’s transcendental and empirical being. Later philosophers, Foucault continued, have oscillated between a positivism, which reduces the transcendental to the empirical, and an eschatology, which reduces the empirical to the transcendental. Marxism moves uneasily between a dominant positivism in which Man’s representations are determined by material circumstances, and a minor eschatology in which history is governed by the final realization of philosophical truth. Phenomenology moves equally uneasily between a dominant idea of pure experience and a minor idea of the body and culture as the empirical bases of such experience.

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Foucault even suggested that we should not be surprised, therefore, at the conjunction of Marxism and phenomenology in the work of Jean-​Paul Sartre, for they are two forms of the one reductionist project. What, someone might ask, about philosophers such as Martin Heidegger, who tried to avoid the problems of the empirico-​transcendental doublet by turning to history as the mode of being? Foucault argued that the turn to history fails. It reproduces the oscillation between positivism and eschatology as one between the retreat and return of the origin. The empirical aspect of Man appears in the retreat of the origin. As Man is a product of life, labor, and language, human history always points back to these empirical forces. No matter how far back one looks, there are empirical forces behind human activity. The origin of Man continually retreats from us. Equally, the transcendental dimension of Man appears in the return of the origin. As Man creates his own representations of the world, human history always emerges out of human activity. Meaningful action always presupposes the prior constructive activity of consciousness. The origin of Man continually returns to us. One problem with Foucault’s critique of Man is its focus on a semiotic code that allegedly defines the Modern episteme. To be in this semiotic code, his critique of Man must be epistemological, but because it is epistemological, it does not have the relationship he implies to liberation from tyranny. Epistemological confusions are not necessarily restrictions on human freedom. My history of Modern thought shifts attention from the structure of an alleged semiotic code to the various worries people have expressed about the concept of Man as a creative and imaginative being with inner depths. Many romantics believed that Man’s creativity was the product of a spirit immanent in nature. In this view, Man can have absolute knowledge and unconditioned autonomy because he partakes of universal spirit. In the late nineteenth century, various challenges undermined the romantic idea of nature as a spiritual power in Man. One challenge was Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution. Darwinism implied that Man is the product of natural selection conceived as blind process, not spirit conceived as final cause. The demise of the romantic view of nature raised two pressing dilemmas. The first was the status of knowledge given that divine spirit did not join object and subject. How can Man transcend subjectivity and attain objectively valid knowledge? Perhaps knowledge is relative to its particular context in a way that undermines the idea of objective truth. The second dilemma concerned the status of freedom given that people do not contain an unconditioned element of divine spirit. How can Man transcend his historical context to attain true freedom? Perhaps historical contexts determine what people do in a way that undermines the idea of freedom.

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According to Foucault, the confusion at the core of the Modern episteme points to its collapse, the death of Man, and the end of the human sciences. He did not claim to have an alternative at hand, for what will emerge depends on an arational epistemic shift. Nonetheless, he did claim to see new possibilities in the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche and the counter sciences of psycho-​analysis, ethnology, and linguistics. These modes of thought herald the fall of the Modern episteme because they challenge the concept of Man. Foucault argued here that the psycho-​analysis of Jacques Lacan, the ethnology of Claude Lévi-​Strauss, and the linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure focus on the Other as a product of impersonal structures, not the Modern concept of Man. Whereas psychology treats the unconscious as a source within Man of his conscious representations, Lacan treats the unconscious itself as a product of structure. Lacanian psycho-​analysis examines the general conditions of unconscious representations. It shows how the principles of death, desire, and law constitute a structure defining the unconscious. Whereas sociology explores how social norms created by Man’s economic activity influence his representations, Lévi-​Strauss relates social norms themselves back to structural oppositions. Lévi-​Strauss examines the structural invariables in which social norms have their being. Ethnology “suspends the long ‘chronological’ discourse by means of which we try to reflect our own culture within itself, and instead it reveals synchronological correlations in other cultural forms”.15 Despite the work of Saussure, Foucault argued that more had to be done before linguistics could take its proper place alongside psycho-​analysis and ethnology. When a structural linguistics took its proper place, however, it would provide a model for psycho-​analysis and ethnology, for they study the unconscious and social norms as formal systems of signs akin to language. Foucault’s main point was that Nietzschean philosophy and the counter sciences explore the conditions outside Man that make Man possible. They investigate “the region that makes possible knowledge about man in general”.16 They locate the basis of knowledge of Man in synchronic, structural oppositions, not the history of Man’s life, labor, and language. They point beyond the Modern episteme to the death of Man. However, historians might approach the work of Lacan, Lévi-​Strauss, and Saussure not as indicative of an impending epistemic shift, but in the context of the dilemmas I suggested came with demise of romanticism. Nietzschean philosophy relates to the question of whether Man can transcend his

15 Foucault, Order of Things, p. 376. 16 Foucault, Order of Things, p. 378.

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subjectivity to get objective knowledge. The modern idea that Man creates representations that change over time raises the question of how these creations relate to the world as it is. G. W. F. Hegel bridged the gap between Man’s changing representations of the world and the world as it is by appealing to a universal spirit that unfolds through history to reach truth. Arthur Schopenhauer challenged the German romantics –​Hegel, Johann Fichte, and Friedrich Schelling –​arguing that nature was not divine spirit but a neutral and amoral force. Nature did not contain a spirit turning subjective representations into objective knowledge. Instead, Schopenhauer saw the self or subject as a will that distorts representation or the world as object. He adopted an antirationalism in which knowledge appears as a product not of reason alone but also of the unconscious activity of will. Crucially, Nietzsche owed much to Schopenhauer. He identified the creative subjective side of Man with the will to power. He espoused a relativist and instrumental view of knowledge. He described the representations Man makes of the world in ways that suggest irrationalism. The counter-​sciences relate to the question of whether Man can transcend his context to attain not only objective knowledge but also freedom. The romantic idea that Man creates his history through autonomous imaginative activity arose alongside the continuing influence of the eighteenth century search for a Newtonian science of society. Indeed, nineteenth-​century social scientists often fused the two. Henri de Saint-​Simon and August Comte adopted a scientific determinism that incorporated a romantic idea of organic development. Similarly, Karl Marx’s historical materialism transformed a Hegelian idea of spirit into a scientific determinism. These Modern social scientists were heirs to a Classical tradition that prompted them to conceive of the development of society as determined by social and historical laws. Nineteenth-​century social science raised the question of how these laws relate to the free actions of individuals. Saint-​Simon, Comte, and Marx tried to bridge the gap between social laws and free individuals by portraying the latter as the outcome of the former. They argued that history ends in the realization of rational autonomy. Positivists looked to enlightened industrialists. Marxists looked to the proletariat. Both justified doing so by reference to laws that allegedly govern the historical process. However, as people came to look upon nature as blind and amoral, so they lost faith in a historical process governed by rational autonomy as a final cause. Thus, Saussure and others such as Émile Durkheim began to investigate social facts. They put questions about the free actions of individuals to one-​side in a methodological gesture. They focused instead on the social background against which individuals act. Saussure and Durkheim approached Man as if he were a product of objective

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social facts. They adopted a methodological determinism, studying human agency as if it were the product not of the individual consciousness but the hidden operation of social forces. Crucially, the structuralists owed much to Saussure. Lévi-​Strauss and Lacan followed Saussure in conceiving of performance or parole as a manifestation of structure or langue; they rejected the very ideas of a free human subject. 4. It is difficult to imagine a return to the romantic idea of a divine spirit immanent in nature and governing history. The theory of evolution teaches that nature is blind. Nature embodies a process of descent that operates according to amoral criteria of natural selection, not spirit as final cause. Evolutionary theory implies that Man arose from a chance occurrence whose consequences were shaped by the organic and inorganic environments. Man is not a manifestation of a universal and unconditioned spirit. Insofar as Nietzschean philosophy and structuralist social science do not fall foul of Darwinism in the way romanticism does, historians might look on them as part of the broad movement of human knowledge. The crucial point is, however, the advance in the natural sciences; modern biology compels a rejection of the romantic belief in nature as a spiritual power in Man. 5. Darwinism precludes the romantic idea of an immanent spirit within Man. It does not imply, however, that there is no option but to adopt positions associated with Nietzschean philosophy and structuralism. Foucault ignored the presence of rival traditions in modern thought. There are alternatives to irrationalism and structuralism. Let me concentrate exclusively on the questions of how Man can escape his subjectivity to attain knowledge of the world, and how Man can escape his historical context to attain freedom. There are at least three responses to these questions, and they are all present in the Modern episteme. The first response is to deny the possibility of Man’s having knowledge or freedom. The irrationalism of Nietzschean philosophy and the structuralism of the counter-​sciences exemplify this response. A second possible response is to deny that subjectivity and historical context are barriers to human knowledge and human freedom. Foucault ignored a strong empiricist strand in modern philosophy that provides a prominent example of this response. Many modern empiricists believe that people have pure perceptions of the world, that is, perceptions that are unaffected by the particular situation. They imply that Man can have objective knowledge simply because he can perceive the world as it is. Similarly, Sartre argued that Man is an autonomous being with an inner space where he can make free choices unaffected by particular historical contexts. A third possible response to the dilemmas afflicting modern thought is to try to steer a course between the first two.

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I want to emphasize that it is possible to defend less absolute concepts of knowledge and freedom than those of the romantics without denying the possibility of knowledge or freedom. One example is Karl Popper’s evolutionary epistemology. According to Popper, the evolutionary process provides a guarantee that our representations are not wholly inadequate to the world even though we cannot be sure that any of our representations correspond exactly to the world. Although our knowledge does not have the certainty the romantics believed, it is not irrational in the way Nietzsche suggested. Similarly, many social democrats argue that Man can be free, if not autonomous, where the nature and extent of his freedom depends on the context. Although people cannot escape social influences, society does not fix or even limit the actions people might try to perform in the way the structuralists suggest. Fully to grasp the range of options found in the post-​romantic era, one must recognize that people can combine any of the responses to the dilemma of knowledge with any of those to the dilemma of freedom. For example, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and others such as D. H. Lawrence combined forms of antirationalism with defenses of an almost romantic idea of unconditioned freedom. Schopenhauer argued that Man can escape from the will into a realm of freedom by means of aesthetic contemplation. Nietzsche saw Man’s will as a creative power capable of freely affirming himself and the world. 6. I have reached the end of my alternative history of Man and the human sciences. This end is not an account of an episteme conceived as a self-​sufficient structure with no basis in the reasoning and creativity of individuals. It does not consist of a description of an impending arational shift from a monolithic Modern episteme to an equally monolithic posthumanist one. It consists, rather, of a broad overview of numerous people subscribing to competing and overlapping traditions. One of these traditions is a lingering romanticism in which pure knowledge and free autonomy are guaranteed as possibilities. Another is a postmodernism, exemplified by Foucault, in which reasonable knowledge and human agency are brushed aside in favor of irrationalism and quasi-​structuralism. Yet another is the postfoundational historicism and humanism that I have adopted as both starting point and conclusion This view holds that we can have reasonable knowledge if not a certainty based on pure facts or pure reason, and we can act rationally and creatively if not entirely free of the influence of historical contexts. It is these three traditions, with their different answers to the problems of knowledge and subjectivity, that constitute the thought of our time.

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Conclusion

My narrative of modern thought sets the scene for much of what follows. The next two chapters explicate postmodern responses to the problems of ­knowledge and subjectivity by locating them against the background of structuralism and the avant-​garde. The philosophical chapters will challenge postmodern views of knowledge and subjectivity, arguing for the alternative ones of a postfoundational historicism and humanism. The chapters on ethics will then explore the implications of these perspectives for analyses of freedom and community.

chapter 3

On Structuralism Postmodernists, like many other modern thinkers, have grappled with the dilemmas of subjectivity and knowledge. Historians can make sense of postmodern responses to these dilemmas by locating them against the ­background of traditions in modern thought. This chapter explores the structuralist background to postmodern views of action and language. The next chapter explores the avant-​garde background to postmodern ideas about freedom and ethics. As I mentioned in the last chapter, Michel Foucault argued in The Order of Things that the structuralist counter sciences heralded the end of the modern episteme since they focused on impersonal structures, not Man. Nonetheless, I  should qualify the suggestion that Foucault was a structuralist. On the one hand, his archaeological method echoed key characteristics of structuralist analysis; it focused on relations between semantic units, and it downplayed human agency. On the other, he distanced himself from structuralism by denying it was a scientific method. Later, in the Forward to the English edition of The Order of Things, he complained that French critics had called him a structuralist even though he did not use structuralist terms. The relation of poststructuralism to structuralism is one of debt and disagreement. Poststructuralists such as Foucault inherited much of the structuralists’ analyses of language and action while rejecting their ideas of scientific method and objective knowledge. This chapter on structuralism explicates the poststructuralist response to the dilemmas of knowledge and subjectivity. I argue that poststructuralists remain wedded to structuralist themes that no longer make sense given their rejection of the scientific pretensions of structuralism as a method. My historical account of poststructuralist ideas thus highlights and explains philosophical confusions in them. The philosophical chapters will further explore these confusions to promote a postfoundational historicism and humanism. 1

Structural Linguistics

Roland Barthes defined structuralism as “a certain mode of analysis of cultural artifacts, insofar as this mode originates in the methods of contemporary

© Mark Bevir, 2022 | DOI:10.1163/9789004513556_004

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linguistics”.1 The methods of linguistics to which he refers came from Ferdinand de Saussure, who was born in 1857 and died in 1913. Saussure wrote a study in comparative philology, a doctorate on Sanskrit grammar, and several technical papers in linguistics. All his work was highly specialized. After his death, two of his colleagues used notes that students had taken in his lectures at the University of Geneva to reconstruct his Course in General Linguistics, and this text then made him famous.2 The Course is a technical work of linguistics. It does not roam among the higher reaches of philosophical speculation about language, knowledge, and mind. On the contrary, it remains firmly focused on the nature of language as an object of scientific study. Saussure’s account of language tries to isolate a suitable object of study for linguists, not to answer philosophical questions. The Course began with a brief look at the study of language since 1800. The inspiration behind much of nineteenth-​century linguistics came from the discovery by administrator-​scholars in India of Sanskrit’s likeness to Greek and Latin. The main likenesses were in patterns of sounds and letters and in the order and role of words in sentences. Linguists thus began to focus on phonology and syntax instead of older philosophical issues. In the eighteenth-​century philosophers had studied language to learn about thought. Their interest was in semantics, that is, how words and ideas refer to and represent external reality. Nineteenth-​century linguists shifted their focus from semantics to phonology, syntax, and linguistic meaning. Phonology concerns the sounds in a language. Syntax concerns the rules for ordering sounds and words in a language. The study of linguistic meaning concerns the way the units of a language convey meaning and ideas. Although it is sometimes misleadingly called “semantics”, it does not ask how ideas and thoughts refer to the world. Nineteenth-​century linguists thus concentrated on patterns of sounds and grammatical rules. They separated the study of language from philosophical concerns about mind and knowledge.

1 R. Barthes, “Science vs Literature”, in M. Lane, ed., Structuralism: A Reader (London: Cape, 1970), p. 412. 2 F. de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, ed. C. Bally and A. Sechehaye, trans. W. Baskin (New York: McGraw-​Hill, 1966). One of Saussure’s students took notes of Saussure’s third and last set of lectures. These notes suggest Saussure’s views differed slightly from those published in the Cours de Linguistique Générale. Nonetheless, I will not refer to them here since they were only published recently, and were not available to the original editors of the Course, nor something that could have influenced the structuralists and poststructuralists. See F. de Saussure, Third Course of Lectures on General Linguistics, ed. and trans. E. Komatsu and R. Harris (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1993).

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Early nineteenth-​century linguists relied on comparisons. They produced tables showing how sounds in one language correspond to sounds in another. They found, for example, that Germanic languages often use /​f/​where Sanskrit, Greek and Latin use /​p/​. Saussure complained the comparativists did not fully grasp the implications of these correspondences. He argued that they failed to distinguish between analysis of the functions linguistic units fulfill and historical explanations of the rise of the units. They mistakenly tied the likenesses to roles that some unit or other allegedly had to fulfill in all languages. In Saussure’s opinion, the correspondences did not reflect the nature of language; they were products of contingent histories. This opinion was common among those linguists who from about 1870 onwards used historical methods to explain the correspondences found by comparative analyses. Saussure contributed to historical linguistics by reconstructing the vowel system of the language that gave rise to Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, and related languages. Yet by the time Saussure wrote the Course, he had become critical of historical linguistics. He complained that it confused the study of the historical development of linguistic units with the study of the place of units in a language. Historical linguists implied that the origins of a language explained how it worked. Saussure argued that they made the opposite mistake to the comparativists. They failed to distinguish their historical explanations of the rise of linguistic units from an analysis of the functions the units fulfilled in a language. Saussure wanted to untangle the proper relationship between historical and functional analysis in linguistics. He argued that a science of language should focus on the place of units in an overall system, not their changes through time. He also argued that a science of language should focus on the place units occupy in an overall system because of the functions they fulfill, not their contingent history. He wanted a structural linguistics that focused on the function of the units of a language in the language as a whole. The Course was his attempt to define the methodological postulates of this structural linguistics. He argued that the scientific study of language postulates an abstract language distinct from particular utterances and composed of arbitrary and differential signs. Linguistics could be a science, Saussure argued, only if it treated language as a stable system of units. But, as he admitted, people constantly develop their languages through use; languages never stay still as they would have to constitute stable systems. Saussure tried to resolve this problem by introducing the methodological postulate of langue. He proposed that linguists begin by abstracting the system, or langue, from speech, or parole. Langue is a system of abstract linguistic units that appear only when embodied in particular utterances made by particular people at particular times. Equally, Saussure

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sometimes suggested that people must have tacit knowledge of langue, for they could not make utterances if they did not understand the systemic rules governing the use of language. Perhaps then langue is a linguistic faculty that we exercise in the act of parole. In either case, langue is social whereas parole is individual. Langue is a set of abstract values defined by their relations to one another; it is the grammar that enables people to make utterances. Parole is the use of these abstract values in particular combinations to produce speech-​acts; it is the utterances people make. Saussure introduced langue as an abstraction from the actual use of language. Importantly, he did so to fix a suitable object of study for a science of linguistics, not to provide a philosophical analysis of knowledge and mind. Linguists had to concentrate only on langue, Saussure explained, because: “in separating language from speaking we are at the same time separating (1) what is social from what is individual; and (2) what is essential from what is accessory and more or less accidental”.3 He believed that langue enabled linguists to focus on the functions of linguistic units without being sidetracked by contingent likenesses, as were comparativists, or contingent developments, as were historicists. Langue was a methodological postulate that defined the object of a science of linguistics. The structural approach to linguistics arose from Saussure’s postulate of langue as an abstract system of signs. Saussure defined a sign as a conjunction of a signified (or concept) with a signifier (or set of sounds). For example, the sign “pet” consists of a signifier made up of the letters /​p/​, /​e/​, /​t/​in that order together with the signified “a tamed animal kept as a favorite”. Saussure famously argued that signs are arbitrary and differential. Parts of his argument are uncontroversial. The conjunction of a particular signifier with a particular signified is arbitrary. There is no natural link between any signifier and the matching signified. For example, people could use the signifier /​tet/​as easily as /​pet/​to stand for “a tamed animal kept as a favorite” provided only that they agreed to do so. Moreover, the arbitrary nature of the sign implies that signifiers are differential. Signifiers are defined by their differences from one another, for while a signifier need not be linked to any particular signified, it must differ from other signifiers. For instance, people could use any set of phonemes to stand for “a tamed animal kept as a favorite” provided the set of phonemes differed from those they used to refer to other concepts. Saussure’s claim that signs are arbitrary and differential is controversial when extended to signifieds as well as signifiers, that is, when extended to 3 Saussure, Course, p. 14.

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concepts as well as sounds. Saussure brushed aside the idea of natural or necessary links between concepts and the reality to which they refer. A common way of explicating his view is to appeal to color concepts, although Saussure himself did not use that example. Imagine that we try to teach pupils the concept “red” simply by pointing to red things and saying “red”. If we then show them an orange and ask if it is red, they will not know. It seems that people cannot make sense of an isolated color merely by appealing to concrete examples of that color. Why is this? Saussure suggested that people experience reality as an undifferentiated continuum; ideas of reality, if one imagines them as distinct from the language in which people express them, are a jumble of images flowing into one another. For example, we experience color as an undifferentiated continuum moving from what we call red to what we call yellow and so on. Further, because our images of the world do not divide into natural packets, we have no special reason to divide this continuum using the set of signifieds we do. For example, we could conceptualize the color spectrum using a set of signifieds such as: W containing what we see as red, orange and about half of yellow; X containing the other half of yellow and a fraction of green; Y containing most of the rest of green; and Z containing the last bit of green and about half of blue. In this view, our signifieds appear as one of many possible ways of dividing the flow of impressions we have of the world. Saussure thus decided that signifieds are arbitrary, not naturally determined. The claim that signifieds are arbitrary raises the question of how people ascribe content to them. Saussure proposed that their arbitrariness required linguists to treat them as differential. He wrote, “the conceptual side of value [a unit in language] is made up solely of relations and differences with respect to the other terms of language”.4 His proposal was that linguists make sense of red by saying it is not-​orange, not-​yellow, not-​green, not-​blue, and so on. Perhaps to know that something is red, our pupils also must know that it is not orange, yellow, green, or blue. Perhaps if we taught them our other color concepts, they would know whether a piece of fruit was red. According to Saussure, the units of langue are related to one another syntagmatically and associatively. Syntagmatic relationships are ones of combination. They mark the places a unit can take in sequence with other units in the language. Linguistic units combine to form strings of phonemes, words, and sentences. For instance, /​p/​, /​e/​, and /​t/​combine to form /​pet/​, and /​the/​, /​dog/​, /​is/​, /​a/​, and /​pet/​combine to form /​the dog is a pet/​. 4 Saussure, Course, p. 117.

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Syntagmatic relationships specify which units can and cannot precede and follow one another. They define the forms of combination allowed by a language. Associative relationships are ones of absence. Saussure argued that they mark the content of a unit in a language. He proposed that linguists identify a unit by distinguishing it from other units that are not present in a given sequence. For instance, linguists might define the value of /​p/​in /​pet/​by distinguishing it from /​b/​, /​g/​, and other phonemes that could take its place. In this view, linguists define both signifiers and signifieds by their associative relations to other units; they identify units by what they are not, by what is absent. Any linguistic unit is the locus of numerous associations that collectively define it in contrast to what it is not. Associative relationships define the nature of linguistic units by picking out the differences between those that can replace one another. Why did Saussure adopt this differential account of signifieds? Why didn’t he define their content by their use in speech-​acts or by the part of the flow of impressions they pick out? It is important to recognize that his position rested not on philosophy but on the methodological postulate of langue. His argument concerned the needs of a science of linguistics. He argued that if linguists are to concentrate exclusively on langue, they must define signifieds without referring to parole (intentionality as displayed in speech) or to things outside language (such as objects of perception). Saussure adopted a differential account of signifieds because he thought that to do otherwise would bring back the confusion between langue and parole that had bedeviled nineteenth-​ century linguistics. He thought that linguists could avoid these confusions by focusing on an abstract set of units defined by relations of combination and absence. Saussure also famously argued that linguists should rely on synchronic structural analyses over diachronic historical ones. He wanted linguists to concentrate on languages as systems defined by the relations among their units, not the historical development of these units. Saussure did not believe that languages really are distinct entities at each moment, as if there were a French of yesterday, a French of today, and a French of tomorrow. He accepted that synchronic structures were a methodological fiction. Nonetheless, he argued that diachronic analyses also rest on a methodological fiction. Whenever linguists study the evolution of a unit, they assume an identity between the earlier and later forms, but they can identify these forms as the same only by recognizing they occupy similar places in the respective languages. Any statement of diachronic identity necessarily summarizes synchronic facts in much the same way as any statement of synchronic identity summarizes diachronic facts.

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Why did Saussure give priority to synchronic analyses? Why not propose a panchronic synthesis? Surely linguists could study both how diachronic developments impact on synchronic systems and how synchronic systems provide the context of diachronic developments. Here too Saussure’s position rested not on philosophical arguments but on the methodological postulate of langue. His emphasis on the synchronic was a result of his attempt to make linguistics scientific by postulating an object of study by which to distinguish the significant from the accidental. He argued that if linguists are to concentrate exclusively on langue, they must treat the units of langue as stable, not as in historical flux. Further, because langue consists of units defined solely by their relationships to one another, changes in the units cannot be a function of langue. Diachronic facts about the evolution of linguistic units are matters of parole, not langue, so they cannot be of interest to linguists. Historical changes occur in parole, and even when they influence langue, their influence is accidental from the perspective of langue itself. Saussure provided the following example.5 At one time the plurals of several nouns were formed by adding an /​i/​: the singular /​fot/​gave the plural /​foti/​. This is a synchronic fact about langue; it is a relation of difference. Later a phonetic change occurred so when an /​i/​followed a stressed syllable containing the vowel /​o/​, the /​o/​became /​e/​: /​foti/​became /​feti/​. This is a diachronic fact about parole: it involves a change of sounds irrespective of relations of difference. However, this diachronic fact had a synchronic effect, for some plurals were then formed by both the addition of /​i/​and a change of vowel from /​o/​to /​e/​: /​fot/​ gave the plural /​feti/​. This example shows how new synchronic states arise. Yet, Saussure continued, from the perspective of langue, the changes occur accidentally. Change does not happen because the old systems themselves produce new ones. Change is the result of external and accidental factors associated with parole. Saussure concluded, therefore, that because changes in langue are due to accidental factors, diachronic analyses of change have no place in linguistics. Change is a matter of parole, not langue, so the study of change cannot be part of the scientific study of langue. Linguists might know that speech-​acts cause shifts from one linguistic system to another, but their science studies only the systems that result from these shifts, not the shifts themselves.

5 It appears Saussure offered only phonological examples because he thought a semantic one would be too complex: Saussure, Course, pp. 83–​87. As this suggests, he recognized a methodological stress on langue and so synchronic or structural analysis was noticeably more problematic when applied to semantics than to phonology: Saussure, Course, p. 141.

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From Method to Ontology

Saussure hinted at the possibility of treating non-​linguistic features of human life as akin to signs. The result would be a science of signs-​in-​general based on his structural linguistics. He wrote, “by studying rites, customs etc as signs, I believe that we shall throw new light on the facts and point up the need for including them in a science of semiology and explaining them by its laws”.6 Before long other people did indeed forge a structuralist movement by applying his ideas to literature, anthropology, mind, and society.7 In doing so, they detached his linguistics from the methodological postulates allegedly needed for scientific analysis. They increasingly presented structuralism as a response to philosophical questions about language, mind, and knowledge. The Prague Linguistic Circle pioneered the use of linguistic analysis in the study of the poetic qualities of literary texts. They placed Saussure’s linguistic theory in the context of the aesthetic theory of the Russian Formalists. The Russian Formalists argued that realism cannot justify or explain works of art. They believed that works of art achieve their aesthetic effects by obeying aesthetic laws, and critics should show how they do so. The Formalists identified these aesthetic laws with the differences between poetic and everyday language. They explored how poetic texts use devices such as hyperbole, image, and repetition to disrupt everyday language and make the familiar seem unfamiliar and striking. In their view, these poetic devices also appear in the narrative structure of other literary texts; plots use these devices to achieve their aesthetic effects. The Prague Circle, which included some of the old Formalists, drew on Saussure’s linguistics in an attempt to show how poetic devices produce aesthetic effects. Their manifesto of 1928 proclaimed the “exceedingly fruitful” impact on linguistics of Saussure’s distinction between langue and parole, arguing that “the principles in relating these two categories (i.e. the existing norm and individual utterances) as applied to literature must be elaborated”.8 The Prague Circle believed that literary tradition is a structure of existing norms against the background of which literary texts appear as utterances. The aesthetic qualities of a text come from its relationship to this tradition. Texts fulfill various functions such as expressing the viewpoint of the writer, 6 Saussure, Course, p. 17. 7 F. Dosse, History of Structuralism, 2 vols., trans. D. Silverman (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999). 8 R. Jakobson and J. Tynjanov, “Problems in the Study of Language and Literature”, in R. Jakobson, Verbal Art, Verbal Sign, Verbal Time, ed. K. Pomorska and S. Rudy (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1985), p. 26.

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influencing the audience, or constituting poetry. The poetic function becomes dominant when the text makes the familiar unfamiliar by breaking an existing norm of the literary tradition. The Prague Circle thus defined poetry by the relationship of the text as parole to the literary tradition as langue. Works of art produce their aesthetic effects by subverting the normal use of signs and drawing attention to the signs themselves. Some members of the Prague Circle, notably Roman Jakobson, later argued that texts are themselves structures defined by the links among their parts. In this view, the aesthetic qualities of literary texts come from a particular internal organization. The poetic function dominates if the relationships of equivalence between units influence not only the selection of units but also their order. Literary texts produce aesthetic effects through their syntagmatic combinations of phonologically or grammatically related units. The devices of hyperbole, image, and repetition rely on juxtapositions of equivalent units. Jakobson thus defined poetry by reference to the internal structure of texts. Other structuralist poetics also prompted literary critics to analyze texts and effects using Saussurean principles. Nonetheless, these structuralist poetics did not necessarily entail philosophical accounts of mind, language, and knowledge. To relate the aesthetic qualities of texts to their linguistic features is not necessarily to say anything about why texts have the linguistic features they do. Jakobson fled to America during World War Two, where, in 1942, he gave a series of lectures. Among the audience was Claude Lévi-​Strauss, an anthropologist who was so taken with what Jakobson said that he began absorbing himself in structural linguistics, later describing Saussure as one of the two great intellectual influences on his life, the other being an eighteenth-​century French missionary to Brazil who undertook anthropological studies. Lévi-​ Strauss produced a structural anthropology, discussing social customs, such as myths and totems, as instances of symbolic phenomena, and looking on the relevant symbols as signs that form a langue. In doing so, he transformed structuralism into an account of mind. He moved from the structures of texts through social customs to a structuralist philosophy of mind and society. Structural anthropology tried to uncover the links among signs as they appear in the cultural practices of traditional societies. The grand ambition was to explore how all humans think irrespective of their particular contexts. Lévi-​Strauss argued that objects have innumerable properties, so cultures can classify them in various ways. Cultures classify objects by comparing and contrasting them as arbitrary signs in a system of signs. Where earlier approaches to myth had explicated a symbol in isolation, Lévi-​Strauss investigated their structural relationships in myths, relating them to one another by their

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common and distinguishing properties. He hoped to show how various symbols act as concrete expressions of the abstract properties that link them to one another. Further, Lévi-​Strauss used structural analysis to explore narrative development in myths and the relationship of particular myths conceived as parole to sets of myths conceived as langue. He identified mythemes as the basic units in myths, explored the syntagmatic and associative links between mythemes, and presented the resulting myths and sets of myths as structures defined by the relations among their units. The myths then displayed the natural workings of mind. They expressed a traditional way of thinking uncluttered by social artifice. Lévi-​Strauss concluded that mind makes sense of the world by building structures in which symbols are related syntagmatically and associatively through their similarities and differences. With Lévi-​Strauss, structuralism began to attract a network of scholars working on very different topics while adapting ideas from one another. Jacques Lacan drew on Saussure to rethink Freudianism.9 He suggested that the unconscious is structured similarly to language. Indeed, he argued that the conscious and unconscious appear only in language. There is no reason to postulate pre-​linguistic thoughts. It is language that gives both structure and content to mind. Lacan thought that the unconscious works through a constant process of transposition in which the associations of one idea pass to another, and another, and so on. He distinguished two types of association: metonymic and metaphoric. Metonymic associations resemble Saussure’s syntagmatic relationships. They produce what Freud called displacement. The unconscious moves from one signifier to an adjacent one with the subject being unable to recognize any link between the two. The repressed belief or emotion is displaced from one signifier to another just because the latter is close-​by. Metaphoric associations resemble Saussure’s associative ones. They produce what Freud called condensation. The unconscious moves from one signifier to an anagogic one that clearly reveals the former. The repressed thought or emotion is joined with a related signifier to present a new appearance. While Lacan thought of language as a structure that gives content to subjectivity, Louis Althusser described capitalism as a structure developing according to laws derivable from its inner workings. It is this structure through these laws that determines the positions and roles adopted by individual subjects.10 Althusser 9

10

See for the application of Saussure’s theories to psycho-​analysis, J. Lacan, “The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis”, and for the use of his reformulated psycho-​analysis to question subjectivity, “The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire in the Freudian Unconscious”, both in J. Lacan, Écrits: A Selection, trans. A. Sheridan (London: Tavistock Publishing, 1977), pp. 30–​113 and 292–​325. L. Althusser, For Marx, trans. B. Brewster (London: Verso, 1969).

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thus concluded that social science can ignore subjectivity and concentrate on the social system conceived as a self-​determining structure. French structuralism of the 1960s had come a long way from Saussure’s concern to construct an account of language that would make it a proper topic of scientific study. For a start, the domain of structuralism had expanded to encompass all the human sciences. The Prague Circle applied it to literature, Lévi-​Strauss to anthropology, Lacan to psychoanalysis, and Althusser to the social sciences. All these extensions of Saussure’s theory rested on a dubious analogy between language as studied by linguists and other objects such as literary texts, myths, the unconscious, and society. In addition, structuralism as a method had become confused with structuralism as a philosophical account of mind, language, and knowledge. Structuralist poetics may have treated texts as structures only for the methodological purpose of examining how their features contributed to their aesthetic effects without implying anything about the nature of mind as the creator of texts. The same cannot be said, however, of later structuralists. Lévi-​Strauss did not only study myths as structures; he argued that myths are structures of a particular type precisely because they are products of minds which necessarily think in a given way. Lacan too saw mind as a structure, or rather an empty vessel full of free-​playing signifiers defined by their relations to one another. Althusser made much the same point, but with social structures providing the content of otherwise empty subjects. Although there were important differences among the structuralists, they shared several beliefs. These beliefs typically reflected a debt to Saussure. Most structuralists expressed this debt in their use of terms such as sign, signifier, and signified. The debt also appeared in several substantive themes. For a start, structuralists adopted a distinction akin to that between langue and parole, language and utterance, or structure and action. They defined a structure as a system of relations between units. Literature as a whole, the individual text, a set of myths, a particular myth, the unconscious, and capitalism were all treated as structures defined by the relationships of their parts. Because the structuralists focused on systems of relationships, they privileged synchronic analysis. They explained features of a text, myth, mind, or society by reference to a system of relations, and they explained this system by appealing to the relations themselves. They avoided diachronic explanations that referred to historical processes and intentional activity. More generally, the structuralists responded to the dilemma of subjectivity by rejecting historicism and humanism with their emphases on unique events and individual agency. The structuralists also shared a belief in the arbitrary nature of the sign. They represented the content of the units in systems as capricious products of the relations among these units. The content of the parts of a structure comes

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from the structure itself. The aesthetic effects of a text come from its relation to a tradition of literature, not its realism. The meanings of symbols in myths arise from their relation to other symbols, not their affinity with objects they symbolize. The displacements and condensations of the unconscious reflect arbitrary relations among linguistic signifiers, not natural associations among ideas. People’s activity under capitalism depends on laws governing capitalism, not their agency and intentionality. A belief in an arbitrary concept of the sign might appear to entail doubts about the possibility of concepts referring to objects in the world. Yet the structuralists nonetheless shared, finally, a belief that their approach was scientific. Saussure adopted his concepts as the methodological postulates of a science of linguistics. The later structuralists also presented their approach as a scientific one focused on underlying systems, not superficial and accidental outcomes and histories. Unlike Saussure, however, they implied that their structuralism reflected not the methodological needs of a science, but the nature of mind, language, and society. They presented structuralism as an objective description of the world. Structuralist poetics offered itself as a scientific theory of the ways in which texts achieve their aesthetic effects. Lévi-​Strauss described his anthropology as a scientific account of myths and practices. Lacan held up Freud as an exemplary scientist who explored the actual working of the unconscious. Althusser defended structuralist Marxism as true to the scientific spirit of the later Marx as opposed to the humanism of Marx’s early writings. More generally, the structuralists responded ambiguously to the dilemma of knowledge, combining skepticism toward the possibility of reference with an insistence on the objectivity of their own ideas. Saussure had combined these two views by treating them as methodological postulates. The structuralists reinterpreted them as philosophical commitments, thereby leaving themselves vulnerable to charges of inconsistency. The structuralist background to poststructuralism appears in conceptual and personal connections. Foucault’s The Order of Things is built on the broadly structuralist idea of an episteme and it points to other structuralists –​ Saussure, Lévi-​Strauss, and Lacan –​as harbingers of the death of Man. Earlier Foucault had studied at the Ecole Normale Supérieure, where he became friendly with Althusser, who was one of his philosophy teachers.11 Althusser introduced him to a French tradition of epistemology and philosophy of science that bears a striking resemblance to structuralism. This tradition appears 11

Biographies include D. Eribon, Michel Foucault (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991); D. Macey, The Lives of Michel Foucault (London: Hutchison, 1993); and J. Miller, The Passion of Michel Foucault (London: Harper Collins, 1993).

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in the work of Gaston Bachelard and Georges Canguilhem, the latter of whom Foucault described as one of his mentors.12 These philosophers argued that scientific progress is not linear but full of ruptures, where a rupture involves a change of problematic, a new orientation to a given set of theories and problems in an established science. Althusser used the concept of a rupture to describe what he regarded as an epistemological break between Marx’s early humanist and later scientific work. Foucault did so to make sense of more general breaks between epistemes. Indeed, Foucault’s early archaeological works straddle structuralism and the French tradition of philosophy of science. He introduced a dichotomy between philosophers who stress consciousness and provide accounts of the subject based on experiences and their meaning, and philosophers –​such as Althusser, Bachelard, and Canguilhem –​who stress concepts and provide accounts of systems of knowledge based on the relations among them. Throughout the 1960s, Foucault aligned his views with those of Lévi-​Strauss and Lacan as representatives of a new philosophy of the concept. He suggested that his work used structuralist tropes because structuralism was the inescapable philosophy of the time. Foucault’s structuralist archaeological informed not only The Order of Things but also his studies of medicine. The Birth of the Clinic traced changing concepts of health from the end of the eighteenth century to early in the nineteenth century, suggesting that each concept arose out of a distinct and arbitrary perceptual code.13 Under the Classical episteme, scholars classified diseases as species with an existence of their own. They thought that a disease afflicted people whose nature it matched. Doctors tried to alter the humors of patients and break the sympathy binding them to the disease. Eventually this medicine of species gave way to a medicine of symptoms with diseases appearing as sets of symptoms that developed through time. Later still there appeared a medicine of tissues in which disease appeared in physiological terms as damage to bodily tissue. In the modern age, doctors try to cure sick bodies and produce normal and healthy individuals. Doctors no longer strive to eliminate disease, asking “what ails you?” They seek to restore normality, asking “where does it hurt?” The structuralist tropes in Foucault’s archaeological approach are clear. For a start, his epistemes and codes are structures akin to langue; they explain superficial phenomena and they require synchronic analysis. Foucault 12 13

G. Gutting, Michel Foucault’s Archaeology of Scientific Reason (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). M. Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception, trans. A. Sheridan Smith (London: Tavistock Publishers, 1973).

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dismissed both intentionality and the sources of change as topics of study. He treated the medical treatises of Phillipe Pinel and Marie Xavier Bichat as products of the classical and clinical epistemes, not of their experiences and beliefs. Like the structuralists, he responded to the dilemma of subjectivity by rejecting humanism and historicism. Foucault also implied that signs and concepts are arbitrary; their content comes from their location in particular epistemes and codes, not from objects of perception or human reason. He rejected the story of continuous enlightenment and progress from Pinel to Bichat and on to Francois Broussais. Instead, he argued that each concept of health reflects a different and arbitrary perceptual code. Like the structuralists, he responded to the dilemma of knowledge partly by bracketing-​off any links between concepts and objects in the world. His hostility to structuralist claims to have founded a science arguably arose here from his application of structuralist analysis to structuralism itself. Equally, however, he gave the impression that his archaeological studies revealed historical objects and epistemes as they actually were. He implied that he offered valid studies of health, madness, and the human sciences as authentic objects of study. Like the structuralists, he thus responded to the dilemma of knowledge partly by suggesting that he had a method or approach that revealed truths about objects in the world. During the 1950s, Foucault and Barthes became good friends and periodic lovers.14 Barthes spent most of the Second World War in sanatoria in the Alps receiving treatment for tuberculosis. After the war, he taught French in Romania and then in Egypt where A. J. Greimas –​a colleague who had promoted structuralist poetics –​introduced him to structural linguistics. When Barthes was appointed, late in life, to a professorship at the prestigious Collège de France, he chose to title his chair “semiology”, acknowledging his continuing debt to Saussure. Earlier, in 1950, Barthes returned from Egypt to France and began his career by proposing a structuralist poetics.15 He argued that writing is an arbitrary signifier defined by its relationship to established literature conceived as a structure. The political import of a text depends on the way it says what it does, that is, the stance it adopts towards an established literary form. Barthes suggested that intellectuals act politically when they reveal the particularity of linguistic forms and signs that represent themselves as universal. 14 15

For biographical details see L-​J. Calvet, Roland Barthes, trans. S. Wykes (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994); and his unorthodox autobiography, R. Barthes, Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, trans. R. Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977). R. Barthes, Writing Degree Zero, trans. A. Lavers and C. Smith (London: Jonathan Cape, 1967). Although Barthes does not refer explicitly to Sartre’s study, most commentators rightly recognize that his book was a response to Sartre.

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In Mythologies, Barthes tried to act politically by revealing how in bourgeois society cultural artifacts represent arbitrary historical phenomena as necessary products of a fixed human nature.16 His approach drew on the structuralist trope of identifying the conventions governing arbitrary signs. He even defined myth as a mode of signification in which arbitrary signs appear natural. As a mythologist, Barthes wanted to peel away false references to the natural and so reveal the true ideological content of signs. For example, he described a film of the Orient that lingers on Buddhist monks confessing to a superior and on the faithful covering a statute of God with gold, and he argued that highlighting these religious practices carried the syncretic message that all religions are identical with a higher Catholicism. Barthes appeared to have exposed a myth by pointing to the arbitrary relation of the images of the film (as signifier) to the message of the film (as signified), for a picture of Buddhists confessing to their superior does not naturally point to the universality of a higher Catholicism. Barthes thus used semiotics to develop a political criticism in which demystification apparently led to an objective analysis of ideology in bourgeois society. Barthes championed a semiology that tied his approach to myth and later narrative and fashion back to structuralist linguistics.17 For a start, he argued that cultural objects necessarily rely on underlying structures that determine how they work. For example, because food is a cultural object that has meaning, particular acts of eating, conceived as parole, must derive from a langue that decides which dishes go with each other and in what order dishes are eaten. Barthes thus examined cultural practices in terms of distinctions and conjunctions in a social structure, not individual choices or historical developments. He implied that far from individuals inscribing meanings in texts and practices, cultural and linguistic structures create meanings and even practices and texts. Barthes here responded to the dilemma of subjectivity with a structuralist opposition to humanism and historicism. In addition, Barthes argued that cultural signs are arbitrary; their content comes solely from the differences between them. For example, there is no natural reason for eating certain dishes with one another and in a particular sequence. Barthes here responded to the problem of knowledge partly by suggesting that concepts cannot pick 16 17

R. Barthes, Mythologies, trans. A. Lavers (London: Jonathan Cape, 1972). Barthes main work of structuralist theory is R. Barthes, Elements of Semiology, trans. A. Lavers and C. Smith (London: Jonathan Cape, 1967). He applied structuralism to the analysis of narrative, where he followed the lead set by Greimas, in R. Barthes, “Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives”, in Image, Music, Text, trans. S. Heath (London: Fontana, 1977), pp. 79–​124.

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out objects in the world. He insisted that semiologists cannot penetrate language to discover a reality behind it. In opposition to Saussure, he argued that far from linguistics being part of a general science of signs, semiology is part of linguistics defined as the study of language.18 Equally, however, he regarded his semiology as a scientific theory about the nature of things, not just a methodological postulate. He implied that the underlying system really does create the particular instance; things do not have natural essences, nor are they the products of a history –​they are just what synchronic structures make them. 3

After Derrida

In 1967 Jacques Derrida published three books that signaled a loss of faith in the then dominant forms of structuralism. Derrida pressed on the ambiguous nature of the structuralists’ response to the dilemma of knowledge. He extended the argument about the arbitrary nature of the sign to the links between signifiers and signifieds. As I have mentioned, several structuralists took the differential nature of signifieds to preclude concepts picking out objects in the world. Foucault rejected claims that structuralism was scientific. Barthes described semiology as a branch of linguistics. Lacan dismissed appeals to pre-​linguistic thoughts behind the endless stream of signifiers. Nonetheless, these structuralists questioned only the possibility of signifieds having content outside a system of signs. They challenged only the idea of concepts getting meaning by referring to objects in the world. Derrida argued more dramatically that signifieds cannot have any stable content; concepts cannot attain stable meanings even from their place in a system of signs. He implied that we should reject structuralist analyses and concentrate instead on deconstructing all structures, discourses, and texts that elide the instability of meaning. Derrida interpreted Saussure’s methodological views as an exercise in metaphysics, rather than a methodological attempt to set up linguistics as a science. He argued that Saussure had mistakenly privileged speech above writing.19 Derrida did not use “speech” and “writing” as people do in everyday life but as philosophical terms to evoke, respectively, fixed meanings that are present to consciousness and anything that challenges such meanings. He charged Saussure with a phonocentric view of writing as a lesser form of speech. Saussure repressed all the ways language exceeds its bounds to unsettle the link 18 Barthes, Elements, pp. 66–​7. 19 J. Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. G. Spivak (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1977), partic. pp. 27–​73.

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between meaning and any conscious presence. Saussure neglected the ways language destabilizes metaphysical ideals of truth and authenticity. Derrida argued, more particularly, that the arbitrary nature of the sign undermines phonocentric appeals to a fixed bond between sound and sense. Saussure’s own definition of the sign implies that there is no stable link between signifiers and signifieds. Derrida thus concluded that despite itself structuralist linguistics reveals the ubiquity of writing, highlighting the unstable nature of the relationship of signifier to signified. Soon Derrida extended his criticism of Saussure to the structuralists’ claim to have founded sciences. His argument appeared in a reading of Lévi-​Strauss’s distinction between two types of thinking.20 Lévi-​Strauss distinguished modern theorists who, like engineers, fashion new concepts for particular purposes, from himself and traditional thinkers who, as myth-​makers, relied on bricolage, shaping concepts out of other concepts that already served various purposes. Derrida argued that because signifiers cannot refer to stable signifieds, all signifiers come from other signifiers, so all thought resembles bricolage; “if one calls bricolage the necessity of borrowing one’s concept from the text of a heritage which is more or less coherent or ruined, it must be said that every discourse is bricoleur”.21 Moreover, Derrida continued, if structuralism is a form of bricolage, it cannot properly claim to be a scientific theory or rigorous method. Derrida pointed to a tension between Lévi-​Strauss’s claim to objectivity and the way his text develops the logic of a differential view of the sign to identify itself as bricolage. Next, Derrida contrasted a structuralism that fails to deal with this tension with one that thinks through the radical implications of its own assumptions. The former recognizes that signs have content only because of relations of difference, but it still ties signifiers to signifieds, presenting itself as a true method for reaching knowledge of fixed objects. In contrast, the latter breaks the tie between signifier and signified, challenging the presence of given objects and recognizing no limit to the free play of signifiers. Where the former had led to semiology, the latter would lead to grammatology –​a science of writing that suspends the link between signifier and signified. The boundary between structuralism and poststructuralism is blurred. Still, one clear boundary-​marker is Derrida’s argument about the instability of signifieds even within systems of signs. Where did this argument come from? Derrida had strong ties to structuralism. He studied at the Ecole Normale Supérieure, becoming close to Althusser and Foucault. Later he described 20 21

J. Derrida, “Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences”, in Writing and Difference, trans. A. Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), pp. 278–​93. Derrida, “Structure, Sign and Play”, p. 285.

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himself as an “admiring and grateful disciple” of Foucault, although he did so as a prelude to extending his criticism of Saussure to Foucault in a way that emphatically marked the end of any such discipleship.22 The structuralists’ influence on Derrida helps explain why he began to probe the phenomenological and humanist background to their principal antagonist –​Jean Paul Sartre. Derrida’s early work was on the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl. As part of his doctoral studies, he wrote a book-​length introduction to Husserl’s The Origin of Geometry. When, years later, he defended his doctorate, he said, “all of the problems worked on in the Introduction to The Origin of Geometry have continued to organize the work I have subsequently attempted in connection with philosophical, literary, and even non-​discursive corpora”.23 Derrida’s work on Husserl’s phenomenology and geometry contains much of the argument he later used against structuralism itself. Husserl thought of phenomenology as a method for exploring consciousness and its objects. In his view, consciousness provided the starting point for philosophical inquiry because it was the one thing we could not deny. He thought that when philosophers focus exclusively on consciousness, they define objects as correlative to thought. They reject the distinction between the object they perceive and their perception of it by bracketing-​off everyday assumptions about a world beyond consciousness. Husserl denied that this phenomenological concentration on the content of consciousness could produce only subjective knowledge. He developed a process of reduction by which phenomenological investigations might distinguish between those features of consciousness that characterized thought as such and those that were contingent features of the thought of the individual. In The Origin of Geometry, he applied this process to mathematical knowledge.24 The truths of geometry are true a priori even though they are recognized as true only as objects of a particular consciousness. Although the truths of geometry originate in the acts of reason that discover them, and although they are recognized as true by each later act of reason that grasps them, errors in these acts of reason cannot alter their status as a priori truths. 22

23 24

J. Derrida, “Cogito and the History of Madness”, in Writing and Difference, pp. 31–​63. Biographies include B. Peeters, Derrida: A Biography, trans. A. Brown (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013); J. Powell, Derrida: A Biography (London: Continuum, 2006); and P. Salmon, An Event Perhaps: A Biography of Jacques Derrida (London: Verso, 2020). J. Derrida, “The Time of a Thesis: Punctuations”, trans. K. McLaughlin, in A. Montefiori, ed., Philosophy in France Today (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), p. 39. E. Husserl, The Origin of Geometry, republished as an appendix to J. Derrida, Edmund Husserl’s “Origin of Geometry”: An Introduction, trans. J. Leavey, Jr. (New York: Nicolas Hays, 1978), pp. 157–​80.

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Derrida argued that Husserl could describe geometric truths as objectively given to pure understanding only by referring to the writing down of these truths.25 If objectivity in geometry were the understandings present to individuals, it would include the mistakes people made. To exclude these mistakes, consciousness needs to compare its contents with an external yardstick. Husserl had to recognize, therefore, that objectivity depends on graphic representations securing the iterability of geometric truths. He implied, contrary to his own argument, that written texts alone give geometric truths the security and permanence of objective knowledge. According to Derrida, although Husserl argued that geometric truths are self-​evident to consciousness, he still had to appeal to the writing down of these truths to secure their objectivity. Derrida soon extended this criticism of Husserl’s account of geometry to cover general phenomenology. He argued that any appeal to truths present to consciousness entails subjectivism, with the source of the truths lying in individual minds and errors being excluded only by writing. Husserl had tried to avoid this difficulty by distinguishing between expressive and indicative features of language. Language is expressive when it carries meanings that are immediately present to consciousness, and indicative when it points indirectly to such meanings. This distinction suggests that we can accept writing when it acts as a transparent medium for pure expressions of thought, but not when it is a barrier to grasping truths recognized by mind. Derrida argued, however, that writing always has an indicative character. He concluded that any attempt to secure concepts appeals to a writing that makes them unstable. Concepts cannot be stable; knowledge cannot be objective. As Derrida’s criticism of structuralism drew on his objections to Husserl’s geometry, so it seems likely that these objections drew on his knowledge of twentieth century mathematical and philosophical logic. The twentieth century witnessed an explosion of arguments about the limits of formal systems, arguments including Kurt Göedel’s incompleteness theorem for arithmetic and Alonzo Church’s undecidability theorem for first-​order logic. Logicians such as W. V. O. Quine, who collaborated with Church, had undermined positivism and promoted pragmatism by arguing that all propositions depend on background theories and that no theory is uniquely determined by any empirical data. All these theories of undecidability surely would have come to the attention of Derrida given that he worked on the philosophy of mathematics. Indeed, we can be sure that Derrida was familiar with at least some of them as early as 1964 when he published a translation of a general article by Quine 25 Derrida, Husserl’s “Origin Of Geometry”.

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on the frontiers of logical theory.26 Nonetheless, Derrida rarely acknowledged all this work in logic, and he showed astonishingly little interest in the new logics and philosophies it inspired. He concentrated instead on reproducing ideas about undecidability in his discussions of Husserl and Martin Heidegger. Undecidability provided the ground from which he overturned metaphysics by challenging the myth of presence. The shift from structuralism to poststructuralism owed much to Derrida’s argument about the instability of meaning. Two features of this shift are especially noteworthy. First, Derrida’s argument could not have had the impact it did if the structuralists had not transformed Saussure’s methodological gesture into an ontological commitment. Saussure gave langue a false stability because he ignored questions of parole, agency, and history, and he ignored these questions for methodological reasons, not because of philosophical opposition to humanism and historicism. If the structuralists had still conceived langue as an artificial methodological construct, they could have brushed off Derrida’s criticisms. They could have said that the neglect of writing –​the false stability they gave langue –​was a simplification needed by a scientific linguistics or anthropology. Arguably, the lesson of Derrida’s argument should have been that structuralism makes sense only as a method; structuralists have no philosophical warrant for banishing agency and history. If people believe that a structuralist method is necessary for science, they should defend structuralism as method, not philosophy. If they do not believe it is necessary, they should return to the humanist and historicist accounts of parole, performance, and practice that Saussure banished for methodological reasons. Ironically, however, the poststructuralists took the opposite lesson from Derrida’s argument. They rejected structuralism as a scientific method while keeping a philosophical commitment to quasi-​structural concepts. Their lingering debt to ­structuralist philosophy led them to rethink its concepts as unstable and indeterminate, not to redefine them as methodological tools, nor to replace them with humanist and historicist alternatives. Derrida redefined structuralist concepts as unstable and indeterminate. He coined the term différance to suggest that meaning is simultaneously deferred and differential. Différance “is to be conceived prior to the separation between deferring as delay and differing as the active work of difference”.27 Derrida’s 26 27

W. Quine, “Les Frontières de la Théorie Logique”, trans. J. Derrida and R. Martin, Les Études Philosophiques 2 (1964), 191–​208. J. Derrida, “The Supplement of Origin”, in Speech and Phenomena, and Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs, trans. D. Allison (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), p. 88. Also, on the nature of différance in relation to Saussure and the structuralists see

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account of meaning undermined the stability of structures and langue. He argued that because signifiers do not refer to stable signifieds, langue is a ­system of differences without any positive terms, so meaning is deferred endlessly across a chain of signifiers. Equally, Derrida’s insistence on the differential nature of meaning still reiterated Saussure’s idea that signs entail systems of oppositions. He tied meaning to a quasi-​structuralist notion of langue, the parts of which are conceived in terms of their relations to one another rather than anything outside the system. Derrida’s debt to structuralism appeared in his acceptance of its response to the dilemma of subjectivity. Although he conceived of langue as an endless play of signifiers rather than a stable structure, he still tied meaning and content to langue, not human intentionality. In his view, “the subject is inscribed in language, is a ‘function’ of language”.28 Derrida inherited the structuralists’ hostility to humanism. He just rephrased this hostility by interpreting humanism, like phenomenology and structuralism itself, as an attempt to deny the unsettling effects of writing. In this view, the author is a mythical presence whose supposed intentionality creates the illusion that performances and texts have stable meanings. A second noteworthy feature in the shift from structuralism to poststructuralism is that Derrida’s argument paralleled many others about the indeterminacy and undecidability of formal systems and language. Quine and Ludwig Wittgenstein argued that indeterminacy undermined attempts to stabilize meaning by appealing to logical analysis and atomic propositions. Their recognition of the vagueness and fluidity of propositions led them to reject logical atomism for pragmatic and contextual theories of meaning and reference. Arguably, the lesson of arguments about indeterminacy should have been that meaning and reference are products of people using language in specific contexts, not of formal systems. Instead, the poststructuralists kept a quasi-​structuralist notion of langue, according to which use or parole was an accidental effect of a system of signs. Their lingering debt to structuralist philosophy led them to reject stable meanings, rather than to explore humanist and historicist alternatives to views of language as a formal system. Derrida rejected the possibility of stable meanings. He coined the term logocentrism to suggest that western thought at least since Plato rested on a mistaken metaphysics of presence. Logocentrism tries to guarantee stable meanings and truth by appealing to the authority of an origin allegedly present outside systems of signs with their constant deferral of meaning from signifier

28

J. Derrida, “Différance”, in Margins of Philosophy, trans. A. Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), pp. 1–​27. Derrida, “Différance”, p. 15.

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to signifier. Derrida’s early work tried to expose this logocentrism. He deconstructed texts to suggest that their written character undermined their overt commitment to the ideals of speech. In Derrida’s view, all logocentric texts get entangled in a logic of supplementarity that undermines them. The texts postulate positive and negative terms, such as speech and writing, but the way they present themselves shows that they can fix the positive term only by tacitly appealing to the negative one. An attentive reading of a logocentric text always yields up points of tension where the seemingly excluded negative term asserts itself against the grain of the explicit argument of the text. Deconstructive readings try to show how texts work against themselves in accord with a logic of supplementarity. Nonetheless, although deconstruction challenges logocentrism, it is not an alternative account of meaning and truth. On the contrary, Derrida went out of his way to avoid appealing to positive terms believing that doing so would entangle him with logocentrism. He placed his concepts under erasure –​sometimes crossing them out in his texts –​to prevent people mistaking the negative task of deconstruction for a positive assertion of an authentic truth.29 Derrida thereby broke with structuralism. Even when structuralists had rejected scientific pretensions, they had understood their work to refer authentically to objects in the world. In contrast, Derrida responded to the dilemma of knowledge by simultaneously denying that language can get meaning directly from the world and asserting that any use of language more or less inevitably suggests that it contains such meanings. 4

Conclusion

Historically poststructuralism arose out of the ashes of the structuralist tradition. Its debt to that tradition does much to explain its characteristic responses to the modern dilemmas of subjectivity and knowledge. There are significant differences among the poststructuralists. Some differences reflect the way Barthes and Foucault followed a trajectory from structuralism to poststructuralism, with Derrida, as a poststructuralist, challenging their early writings. Other differences remain even if we focus on the later work of Barthes or Foucault. For example, whereas Foucault located forms of rationality in social contexts defined by power, Derrida explored the internal features of texts and developed experimental ways of presenting his ideas. Despite these

29 J. Derrida, Spurs: Nietzsche’s Styles, trans. B. Harlow (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1979).

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differences, however, the poststructuralists share common themes that enable us to regard them as a cohesive group. Several of these themes reflect their shared location in the structuralist tradition associated with Saussure. Saussure postulated langue in a methodological gesture designed to turn linguistics into what he believed would be a proper science. This gesture made language appear as a formal and autonomous system. Parole –​the historical use of language by individuals –​was denigrated as a mere function of the system or an accident. Structural linguistics was, therefore, firmly opposed to historicism and humanism. Although some structuralists questioned its status as a science, and although Derrida argued powerfully that langue, like all formal systems, was bedeviled by a dose of indeterminacy, the poststructuralists continued to use concepts closely resembling that of langue. After Derrida, they began increasingly to stress the unstable, incomplete, and even contradictory nature of structures, but they still presented mind, language, and society as an unstable langue of which parole was a mere function. Their belief in unstable quasi-​structures governed their responses to the dilemmas of subjectivity and knowledge. Typically, they responded to the dilemma of subjectivity with an anti-​humanism that drew on the idea that parole is a by-​product of langue. Barthes began to portray the author and subject as an accidental effect of writing conceived as the play of signifiers. Foucault argued that subjects were effects of discourses, technologies, and practices of power/​knowledge. Lacan wrote, “man speaks, then, but it is because the symbol has made him man”.30 Typically, the poststructuralists responded to the dilemma of knowledge by suspending or renouncing questions of truth on the grounds that meanings come from an unstable langue as opposed to objects in the world or consciousness. Barthes argued that we could only disentangle, not decipher, signifiers. He wrote, “the structure can be followed, ‘run’ (like the thread of a stocking) at every point and at every level, but there is nothing beneath”, for “writing ceaselessly posits meaning ceaselessly to evaporate it, carrying out a systematic exemption of meaning”.31 Foucault invoked regimes of truth composed of ordered procedures that govern the production and circulation of legitimate statements. But we should ask: if appeals to langue were supposed to make possible a science of linguistics, why should we continue to appeal to an unstable langue after we accept that such a science is not possible? 30 31

Lacan, “Function and Field”, p. 65. R. Barthes, “Death of the Author”, in Image, Music, Text, p. 147.

chapter 4

On the Avant-​Garde The poststructuralists grappled with problems of knowledge and subjectivity in ways that drew on structuralism. The scientific pretensions of the structuralists had led them to keep the philosophical problems of language and action separate from the ethical ones of justification and freedom. However, as the poststructuralists challenged these scientific pretensions, so the ethical questions pressed on them. Jean Baudrillard, a leading postmodernist, told an interviewer, “I was very, very attracted by Situationism”, and “even if today Situationism is past, there remains a kind of radicality to which I have always been faithful”.1 Jean-​ Francois Lyotard, another prominent postmodernist, invoked a similar radicalism, championing “the activity of the [avant-​garde] artist and the critical philosopher, ‘republican’ politics –​any inventive step which, on the path of the unknown, of the unacceptable, breaks with constituted norms, shatters consensus, and revives the meaning of the différend”.2 The avant-​garde –​situationists, surrealists, and Dada –​wanted to disrupt bourgeois society. But they also stressed the difficulties of avoiding entrapment in that society and the capacity of that society to tame radical gestures and reshape them for its own ends. The avant-​garde looked for sites and strategies that would prove immune to recuperation. They appealed to play and excess, the body and desire, and aesthetic self-​creation and transgression. These avant-​garde sites and strategies characterize the radicalism to which Baudrillard, Lyotard, and other postmodernists remained attached. This chapter places postmodernism in the avant-​garde tradition to explicate postmodern responses to ethical questions relating to knowledge and subjectivity. I argue that the postmodernists remained wedded to avant-​garde sites and strategies that no longer made sense once they rejected the real. This critique explains theoretical difficulties that beset postmodernism. The later chapters on ethics will tackle these difficulties from the perspective of a postfoundational historicism and humanism.

1 J. Williamson, “An Interview with Jean Baudrillard”, Block 15 (1989), 18. 2 J-​F. Lyotard and J. Rogozinski, “The Thought Police”, Art and Text 26 (1987), 30.

© Mark Bevir, 2022 | DOI:10.1163/9789004513556_005

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Poststructuralist Ethics

After Jacques Derrida’s intervention, poststructuralists increasingly rejected appeals to hidden structures and stable meanings. They stressed the indeterminacy and superficiality of meanings. They appealed to play, fragmentation, and excess. Roland Barthes argued that meanings arise from an open-​ended play of signifiers and codes across the surface of texts. He suggested that a text is the product of fragments and traces of other texts that leap across its pages creating a plurality and excess of meaning. Barthes wanted readers to approach texts in an equally playful spirit. In his view, because meanings do not come from authorial intentions, systems of rules, or anything else of the sort, readers need not worry about reducing a text to anything else. Readers can enjoy tracing a fluid textuality of unfolding signifiers and the allusions a text makes to others. Readers can follow various other texts as they blend and clash across the pages of the one they are reading. They can take pleasure in exploring a text as it relates to other texts. They then create yet more texts. Barthes began to read by skipping ahead, dipping in and out, and sampling texts, savoring them not for their unity, but for “the abrasions I impose on the fine surface”.3 His study of Honoré de Balzac’s novella, Sarrasine, exemplifies such a reading.4 Barthes divided the novella into lexias or parts to show how various codes play across the text and produce an excess of meaning. These lexias and codes break away from one another and from themselves, fragmenting the text and facilitating plural, even contradictory, readings. The poststructuralists new emphasis on play, fragmentation, and excess led to questions about their ethical and political commitments. Some critics complained that Barthes the scientific structuralist had become a man of letters. The political critic of bourgeois society and literary institutions had developed a more literary and less incisive voice. These criticisms raised more abstract questions. The structuralists often had posed as critical theorists and their critiques often had rested on their claim that their scientific method stripped away superficial and ideological appearances to reveal a hidden reality. Although the poststructuralists rejected this scientific method, they wanted to keep the mantle of critical theory. The question thus arose: on what grounds and to what end did they criticize? Barthes justified his new approach to reading by reference to a pleasure that he located in the body. He suggested that semiology is a form of

3 R. Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, trans. R. Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1975), pp. 11–​12. 4 R. Barthes, S/​Z, trans. R. Miller (London: Jonathan Cape, 1975).

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entertainment. The purpose of criticism is not a correct interpretation but an enjoyment of texts as decentred objects. According to Barthes, the most intense bliss comes from texts that indefinitely extend the play of codes. These texts refuse to allow readers to settle on one interpretation. They unsettle readers, denying them the security of an illusory stability. Bliss comes not from grasping meanings but from absorption in textuality. Barthes here equated textuality with the surface of texts, even suggesting that these surfaces were material. Absorption in textuality is, therefore, a material pleasure of the body. For Barthes, intellectual and physical enjoyment merge as reading produces erotic bodily sensations. Why, we might ask, was Barthes so anxious to equate textuality with materiality and bodily pleasure? Part of the answer comes from the way in which ethical questions pressed on poststructuralism. Because poststructuralists remained hostile to humanist ideas of the subject, because they separated meaning and action from choice and intentionality, they could not properly justify their ethics by appeals to a free and authentic subjectivity. Barthes appealed to the body in an attempt to justify his ethic without appealing to subjectivity. He distinguished sharply between the body and subjectivity.5 The body is an empty vessel that can experience pleasure without a consciousness giving meaning to experience. Subjectivity is the consciousness that arises from the historical biography of the body. According to Barthes, if we examine our enjoyment of a text, we find not only a conscious enjoyment that comes from our subjectivity but also a pleasure of the body. A sharp distinction between body and subjectivity enabled Barthes to defend his ethics of pleasure while still insisting that the subject is a false unity. The distinction between body and subjectivity plays a similar role in some of Michel Foucault’s work. In the 1950s and 1960s, Foucault applied his archaeological approach to medicine and the human sciences, and in Madness and Civilization to the changing constructions of madness in Europe from the Renaissance to the close of the nineteenth century. Foucault argued that Enlightenment rationality excluded and repressed ways of thinking that escaped its boundaries; the mad are locked in asylums. Repressed ways of thinking, including madness, provided Foucault with sites for an alternative consciousness that he could use to speak out against bourgeois reason. He thus sought to capture the reality and freedom of madness conceived as authentic

5 See Barthes, Pleasure of Text; and also R. Barthes, “The Adjective is the ‘Statement of Desire’”, in The Grain of the Voice: Interviews 1962–​1980, trans. L. Coverdale (London: Jonathan Cape, 1985), pp. 172–​76.

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truth –​“an undifferentiated experience, a not yet divided experience of division itself”.6 When Derrida extended his criticisms of Saussure to Foucault, he challenged just this feature of Madness and Civilisation. Derrida argued that writing a history of madness entails imposing language, order, and reason on it; any attempt to voice madness is just another repression of it.7 Foucault seems to have accepted Derrida’s argument, and so to have begun linking resistance to other sites and strategies, such as the body and transgression. Because Foucault still rejected the idea that the subject is prior to its discursive construction, he suggested that individuals do not have a given nature to be liberated, but are, rather, spaces where power inscribes various natures. Nonetheless, he championed the body as a site that refuses to let power pin it down. Just as Barthes distinguished the body from subjectivity, so Foucault distinguished the body, which experiences pleasure, from the soul, which is the identity one receives as an effect of discourse and power. On the one hand, Foucault insisted that the soul arises as power imposes an identity on the body, turning it into a subject; before power goes to work, people do not have the stability needed to constitute themselves as subjects. He believed, “nothing in man –​not even his body –​is sufficiently stable to serve as a basis for self-​recognition”.8 On the other, he implied that the body could act as a site from which to reject all ascribed identities. He argued that “once power produces this effect, there inevitably emerge the responding claims and affirmations, those of one’s own body against power”.9 Foucault’s shift from madness to the body might not have satisfied Derrida. Derrida might have argued that the body reflects discourse and power rather than resisting them. His criticisms of Foucault suggested that resistance and critique are possible only from within thought and language, and that thought and language necessarily entail moments of exclusion and repression. The inescapability of language and exclusion are recurrent themes in Derrida’s work on ethics. He addressed them as early as 1964 in an essay contrasting

6 M. Foucault, Madness and Civilisation: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, trans. R. Howard (London: Tavistock, 1965), p. xi. 7 J. Derrida, “Cogito and the History of Madness”, in Writing and Difference, trans. A. Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967), pp. 31–​63. 8 M. Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History”, in The Foucault Reader, ed. P. Rabinow (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), p. 87. 9 M. Foucault, “Body/​Power”, in Power/​Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–​ 1977, ed. C. Gordon (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1980), p. 56.

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Emmanuel Levinas with Martin Heidegger and Edmund Husserl.10 He argued that whereas Heidegger and Husserl tried to subordinate ethics and overcome metaphysics by returning to the original questions of philosophy, Levinas defended the priority of ethics as a free questioning that could provide a type of transcendence. The essay is almost unique among Derrida’s writings of that time in its sympathy for another philosopher –​Levinas. Levinas went to Freiburg University in 1928 to study with Husserl and while there he met Heidegger. Levinas’s early work introduced these philosophers to France. But later, after the Second World War and Heidegger’s involvement with the Nazis, Levinas tried to begin philosophy with ethics, not ontology. Levinas suggested that ethics is otherwise than Being. Subjectivity arises out of a primary face-​to-​face relation with an unknowable other. The self is possible only with recognition of this other. As Levinas later explained, “my ethical relation of love for the other stems from the fact that the self cannot survive by itself alone, cannot find meaning within its own being-​in-​the-​world, within the ontology of sameness”.11 Yet although he based ethics in a relation to the other before subjectivity, he described this relation as separation, not community. The other is unknowable, and the experience of it is one of distance. It is separation and distance from the other that makes possible subjectivity and so the non-​ethical and selfish impulses that then can lead to a neglect of responsibility to the other. According to Levinas, people’s distance from the other reflects its unknowable nature. The meeting with the other is not an event that occurs in space and time, but rather a philosophical postulate of a meeting that always has already taken place. The experience of the other is one of alterity, and this alterity implies that the relation to the other is asymmetrical and singular. The relation is asymmetrical because it creates our duty to the other without any consideration of the others’ response to us; if we denied this asymmetry, we would incorporate the other into our knowledge and so deny its alterity. The relation is singular because our response to the other is unique; if we denied this singularity, we would assimilate the other to all others and so deny its alterity. For Levinas, the asymmetrical and singular nature of our relation to

10 11

J. Derrida, “Violence and Metaphysics: An Essay on the Thought of Emmanuel Levinas”, in Writing and Difference, trans. A. Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), pp. 97–​102. R. Kearney, “Ethics of the Infinite: Dialogue with Emmanuel Levinas”, in R. Kearney, Dialogues with Contemporary Continental Thinkers: The Phenomenological Heritage (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), p. 60. Also see E. Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. A. Lingis (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1979).

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the other implies that ethics is before law and politics. Ethics is before the law because the law imposes a symmetrical and general pattern of rule on our relations with one another. Ethics is before politics because politics only arises when a third party appears, forcing us to decide among rival claims. Levinas understood ethics as an unconditional responsibility to an absolutely other, whereas he thought of politics and law as the decisions and rules by which we regulate social interactions. Why did Derrida find Levinas’s ethics so congenial? One reason was that Levinas’s portrait of the individual subject as a product of relations of difference echoed the anti-​humanist analysis of meaning that Derrida had adopted against the background of Saussurean linguistics. However, the main reason was the overlaps in their respective critiques of phenomenology. Derrida’s argument that Husserl relied on a troubling myth of presence echoes Levinas’s argument that phenomenological ideas of the other assimilate it to its presence for the self. Both Derrida’s concept of différance and Levinas’s concept of the other evoke an absence that directs their respective philosophies. Derrida described his philosophy as “a positive response to an alterity which necessarily calls, summons, motivates it”.12 As Levinas thought that alterity and the other produce ethics, so Derrida thought that alterity and différance produce meaning. As Levinas suggested that defining the other risks assimilating it to the known, so Derrida implied that meaning always escapes its bounds. As Levinas struggled to ensure his writing resisted reification through its flexibility and shifting terminology, so Derrida placed concepts under erasure. In the 1960s and 1970s Derrida wrote little that directly addressed ethics or politics other than the essay on Levinas. Some critics complained that deconstruction was ethically neutral. Others said it was nihilistic. When Derrida replied, he again echoed themes from Levinas. He argued that deconstruction is ethical because it embodies our responsibility to the other in its commitment to questioning. In his view, our responsibility to the other demands that we treat everything as a target for deconstructive questioning, for deconstruction is the exercise of that responsibility. Although Derrida echoed themes from Levinas, he also raised doubts about the latter’s ethics, complaining that Levinas slighted the feminine, failed to distinguish religion from ethics, misread Husserl, and remained –​despite good intentions –​tainted by humanism and metaphysics.

12

R. Kearney, “Deconstruction and the Other: Dialogue with Derrida”, in Kearney, Dialogues with Contemporary Continental Thinkers, p. 118.

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Derrida first raised several of these doubts in the 1964 essay that deconstructed Levinas to suggest that the other remains ensnared in presence and so in part the same. Derrida’s criticism of Levinas was that Levinas did not fully recognize the problem of speaking about radical alterity; to speak of the absolutely other is to make it present in a way that it means it always escapes. Derrida thus argued that alterity and the other can be understood only in relation to the same and the self; the other cannot properly be thought as absolutely other. Derrida’s doubts about Levinas’s idea of an absolutely other clearly overlap with his criticisms of Foucault. Levinas’s idea of the other and Foucault’s idea of madness masquerade as sites outside the tyranny of the same and power. Derrida argued, against them, that people cannot grasp a thing-​in-​itself outside language and free of all traces of the same. He insisted that the other and madness, like all concepts, are relational ones bearing the trace of others. When Derrida began in the 1980s to write more directly on ethics and politics, he shifted from a relational concept of the other to a more absolute one. He began to write of the other, justice, and democracy in ways that locate them outside language, the same, and power. Derrida now stressed the otherness of the other, not its relation to self. He no longer insisted the other could be thought only in relation to the same and so in a way that gives it some content. Instead, he argued against ascribing any determinate content to the other, for to do so would be to undermine its alterity; to do so would be to exclude other others who do not have that content. Derrida tried to respect absolute otherness by evoking a refusal to decide and an openness to that which is yet to come. He followed Levinas in suggesting that we owe the other an “absolutely and irreplaceably singular responsibility”.13 He came close to echoing Levinas in persistently questioning the validity of general responsibilities defined in contrast to an absolute and singular responsibility to the demands of the wholly other. For Derrida, as for Levinas, the absolute and singular nature of our responsibility to the other means we can fulfill it only by sacrificing other others. As Derrida wrote, “I am responsible to anyone (that is to say to any other) only by failing in my responsibility to all others, to the ethical and political generality”.14 In this view, when we decide to respond to an other, we neglect our responsibility to the wholly other; we ascribe content to the other, excluding those other others who do not have that content. Thus, Derrida wrote of the

13 14

J. Derrida, Politics of Friendship, trans. G. Collins (London: Verso, 1997), p. 37. J. Derrida, The Gift of Death, trans. J. Wills (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), p. 70.

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importance of refusing to decide, for only by doing so can we avoid neglecting our responsibility to the wholly other. He did not deny that we have to decide if we are to act. He argued instead that all action entails decisions for which there is no general justification. He suggested that we decide how to act in a moment of madness –​a leap into the unknown. This leap takes us from justice, conceived as our relation to the other, to morality and the law, conceived as general norms and rules for society. However, Derrida added, no matter what we decide, we cannot be just, because any decision necessarily neglects our responsibility to the wholly other. He argued that justice and democracy are impossible and always yet to come. They are messianic in that we are always waiting for them. The emancipatory promise is “a messianism without religion, even a messianism without messianism, an idea of justice –​which we distinguish from its current concept”.15 Why did Derrida shift from a relational concept of the other to an absolute and infinite one? Maybe he made a mistake. Maybe he forgot his earlier doubts. Maybe he changed his mind. However, his later ethic resembles his theory of meaning in ways that suggest the shift arose partly from themes pervading his philosophy. Because Derrida rejected the structuralist idea that stable signifieds fix the content of a system of signs, he could not describe meaning or responsibility by reference to any such structure. As I suggested in the last chapter, this rejection of structuralism could have inspired a return to historicist and humanist accounts of parole, practice, and performance. But because Derrida opposed humanism, he did not locate the source of meaning or responsibility solely in terms of the finite activities and demands of individual subjects. Although he wrote eloquently on the individual’s experience of ethics and undecidability, he inscribed meaning and responsibility in a “quasi-​condition”.16 He invoked quasi-​ structural quasi-​metaphysics, treating performances and demands as embodiments of a quasi-​structure that could not be reduced to the activity of individuals. He appealed to structures that are not structures, systems composed of differences that are not positive terms, and an absolute other that is not an other defined by its relation to self. Derrida inscribed meaning and responsibility in a quasi-​structural quasi-​ metaphysics. He saw meaning and responsibility arising from structures of differences informed by a philosophy of absence. Derrida was most willing

15

J. Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, The Work of Mourning and the New International, trans. P. Kamuf (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 59. 16 J. Caputo, “The Villanova Roundtable: A Conversation with Jacques Derrida”, in Deconstruction in a Nutshell (New York: Fordham University Press, 1997), p. 103.

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to locate his quasi-​structural quasi-​metaphysics in relation to negative theology.17 He suggested that the quasi-​conditions of meaning and responsibility are things of which we cannot speak. The quasi-​condition of deconstruction is the simultaneous possibility and impossibility of an unnameable and indeconstructable space. For metaphysics, it is “behind” the origin in “a necessity which is neither generative nor engendered and which carries philosophy”.18 For meaning, “this unnameable is the play which makes possible nominal effects, the relatively unitary and atomic structures that are called names, the chains of or substitutions of names in which, for example, the nominal effect différance is itself enmeshed”.19 In ethics, “there would no more be any ‘politics,’ ‘law,’ or ‘morals’ without this possibility [of negative theology], the very possibility that obliges us from now on to place these words between quotation marks”.20 Clearly, Derrida wanted to distinguish his ethical theory from metaphysical alternatives. Where a metaphysics of presence gives specific content to meaning and justice, his quasi-​metaphysics inscribed them in difference and absence, highlighting their impossibility. He even suggested that his quasi-​ structural quasi-​metaphysics needs a different style from that of philosophy and everyday language. Because the quasi-​condition of deconstruction is absent and impossible, people cannot speak of it, but only gesture at it. But I wonder: does negative theology really differ from theology? Does a quasi-​ metaphysics of absence really differ from one of presence? Do quasi-​structures of differences really differ from those made up of positive terms? The suspicion is that Derrida did not avoid the problems he found in the work of Levinas and Foucault. 2

Surrealists and Others

The suspicion that Derrida came dangerously close to falling foul of his own criticisms of Foucault grows with recognition of their shared debt to the

17 18 19 20

Derrida distinguished his views from negative theology most clearly in J. Derrida, “How to Avoid Speaking: Denials”, Psyche: Inventions of the Other, ed. P. Kamuf and E. Rottenberg (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008), vol. 2, pp. 143–​195. J. Derrida, “Khora”, in On the Name, ed. T. Dutoit (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), p. 126. J. Derrida, “Différance”, in Margins of Philosophy, trans. A. Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), pp. 26–​27. J. Derrida, “Sauf le nom: (Post-​Scriptum)”, trans J. Leavey Jr., in Derrida, On the Name, p. 81.

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avant-​garde. The avant-​garde provided poststructuralists with concepts such as play and excess, body and desire, absence and impossibility, and aesthetic self-​creation and transgression. Barthes and Foucault could move easily from a structuralist position to a poststructuralist one partly because they sympathized with the avant-​garde and its use of play, fragmentation, and excess to explore the indeterminacy and superficiality of meaning. Derrida’s intervention encouraged them to explore these avant-​garde themes in opposition to high structuralism. Barthes, Foucault, and Derrida had close ties with Tel Quel, a journal that combined avant-​garde poetics and structuralism to promote an alternative form of Marxism to the dominant existential humanism of Jean-​Paul Sartre. It was in this context that Barthes championed the avant-​garde noveaux romanciers against the littérature engagée promoted by Sartre.21 Barthes argued that Sartre’s ideal of plain language is impossible because plain language is just a stance towards literature. In Barthes’s view, no text has a natural political significance merely because of what it says. The political import of a text always depends on the way in which it says what it does, that is, the stance it takes towards a settled literary form. The writing of the classical age posed as natural, presenting itself as universally intelligible through a shared and familiar world to which it referred. Progressive writing challenges this ideological assumption of universality by self-​consciously engaging with literature. Barthes thus concluded, in opposition to Sartre, that progressive writing is neither realistic nor transparent. On the contrary, progressive writing challenges settled literary forms by using experimental and self-​referential techniques to expose the ideological nature of the myth of a natural and universal writing. Barthes appealed here to the way in which the avant-​garde used experimental ­techniques to free language from the conventional ideas of authorship and representation. Avant-​garde writing showed how meaning can arise as an indeterminate product of spontaneous play in language itself. The avant-​garde prefigured Barthes and the other poststructuralists in relating meaning to play, fragmentation, and excess. These avant-​garde themes date back at least to the aesthetes of the late nineteenth-​century. Many romantics believed in a real harmony defined in contrast to the alienated world about them. The more optimistic among them thought that art could express this harmony and contribute to realizing the real. By the late nineteenth-​century, however, the aesthetes were increasingly worried by what they considered to be the totalizing nature of bourgeois society. The romantic idyll of individuals 21

R. Barthes, Criticism and Truth, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987).

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living in harmony with themselves, one another, and nature gave way first to fin de siècle decadence and then to avant-​garde radicalism. As aesthetes, such as Oscar Wilde in Britain and Charles Baudelaire in France, gave up on a natural and pre-​social harmony, so they turned to decadence and the baroque. All they had left was a belief in individual self-​expression as aesthetic creation and a hope that acts of transgression might contribute to the fall of bourgeois society and the rise of an authentic alternative. The avant-​garde interpreted the First World War as further evidence of the corruption of bourgeois society and its ability to absorb subversion. Dada, surrealism, and situationism tried to reject the moral and rational ethos of European civilization. Because they believed art was implicated in the bourgeois society that had produced the War, they challenged ideas of originality, artistic form, and genius, turning instead to opacity, limits, and the fragmentation of meaning, reason, and self. Because they stressed the totalizing nature of bourgeois ideology, they tried to situate their critiques at sites beyond reason, notably the body, the impossible, and the inexpressible. Again, because they stressed the recuperative powers of bourgeois society, they adopted situational and transitory strategies, notably excess, self-​creation, and transgression. Dada had the avant-​garde’s simultaneous debt to and distance from the fin de siècle decadence of the aesthetes. On the one hand, Dada too sought to disrupt and overturn conventional artistic practices and existing social relations. Marcel Janco recalled, “we began by shocking the bourgeoisie, demolishing his idea of art, attacking common sense, public opinion, institutions, museums, good taste, in short, the whole prevailing order”.22 On the other hand, Dada’s concern with the recuperative powers and totalizing effects of bourgeois society meant that its practitioners went to great lengths to avoid appealing to an alternative which might be absorbed by society. Sometimes they suggested that an anarchic rejection of all codes committed them to transgression while precluding their advocating an alternative set of social relations. At other times they described their alternative vision as playful or irrational in an attempt to indicate the impossibility of bourgeois society taking it over. They talked of transgressing “the reasonable descriptions of man” to “recover the natural and unreasonable order”.23 So, although Dada declared itself anti-​ art, it mainly opposed the bourgeois production and consumption of art, not artistic creation. Dada talk of a non-​art mainly signaled its determination that its alternative vision of art should not be absorbed by bourgeois society. Dada 22 23

M. Janco, “Dada at Two Speeds”, in L. Lippard, ed., Dadas on Art (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-​ Hall, 1971), p. 36. J. Arp, “Dadaland”, in Lippard, ed., Dadas on Art, p. 28.

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art ran contrary to the prevalent notions of form and value precisely to create meanings that might reveal a more natural way of being. For example, when Hugo Ball used phonetic poems to renounce a language he believed had been corrupted, he tried to return to a truer language of immediate experience, a language that supposedly had not been devalued by alienated social relations. It has become a cliché to describe surrealism, which emerged in Paris in the 1920s, as a negation of the Dada negation. Although the leading surrealists, including Louis Aragon and André Breton, initially sympathized with Dada, they came to believe it precluded all efforts to create constructive artistic and political practices. The surrealists adopted Dada sites and strategies for disrupting bourgeois society; they too explored the body, the erotic, myth, and the irrational, and they too believed in transgression, fragmentation, and play. In their view, however, Dada’s use of these sites and strategies made little sense without a positive ideal. The surrealists tried to introduce a positive dimension to Dada’s critique by appealing to total unity. As their Second Manifesto explained, “it is vain to search for any other motive in surrealist activity than the hope of discovering that point … [where] life and death, the real and imaginary, the past and the future, the communicable and the incommunicable, the high and the low, cease to be perceived as contradictory”.24 The surrealists drew on sources such as romanticism, Hegelian philosophy, and hermetic alchemy to argue for the complementarity of opposites, including subject and object, imagination and reason, and life and death. They argued that bourgeois society obstructed our vision of unity, and Dada’s sites and strategies could disrupt bourgeois society and access unity. Intimations of unity lay in the mythical, the unconscious, taboos, and the erotic, and they could be heightened through play, festival, transgression, fantastic images, automatic writing, and experimental artistic techniques akin to those Barthes later defended against Sartre. Georges Bataille, the surrealist to whom the poststructuralists most often appealed, fused Dada’s strategies with an ideal of unity. Bataille contrasted solidity and sovereignty. Solidity reflects the discontinuous element of being. It postulates isolated stable objects that can be studied with detachment, as in bourgeois reason and orthodox science. Sovereignty reflects the unity found in the continuous element of being. It acknowledges the ambivalent and developing nature of the world, and it leads to a transformative knowledge that promises “a voyage to the end of the possible of man”.25 According to Bataille, 24 A. Breton, “Second Manifesto of Surrealism”, in Manifestos of Surrealism (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1972), pp. 123–​4. 25 G. Bataille, Inner Experience, trans. L. Boldt (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988), p. 7.

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capitalism and solidity allow us to exist only as alienated and isolated beings in a homogenous rational order. He wanted to promote sovereignty and transformative knowledge through festival, play, and sacrifice. In particular, he wanted to counter bourgeois reason with a new myth based on organic insights. This new myth would unite the individual with society by developing new possibilities for heterogeneity and new opportunities to abandon ourselves to the sacred. It would encourage us to suspend subjectivity by sacrificing self to other. The positive vision of Bataille and the other surrealists is perhaps at odds with one rationale for Dada’s strategies. Dada adopted its strategies because their situational and transitory qualities were supposed to make them immune to absorption in a totalizing bourgeois society. When surrealists tied these strategies to a positive ideal with determinate content –​unity, sovereignty, transformative knowledge, or sacrifice –​they ran the risk of having the ideal taken over by bourgeois society. To some extent, the surrealists tried to minimize this risk precisely by associating their visions of unity with sites that lay beyond reason, including myth, the irrational, and the unconscious. In addition, they sometimes implied that their vision could not be taken over because it lacked all content. As Bataille explained, “we find the human quality not in some definite state but in the necessarily undecided battle of the one who refuses the given, whatever that may be, providing it is the given”.26 Elsewhere Bataille suggested that sovereignty was an unknowing or non-​knowledge. The sovereign moment consisted not only in cancelling bourgeois knowledge but also suspending any other knowledge; it consisted in the exhaustion of thought, the absence of meaning, silence. Bataille’s concepts of sovereignty and the sacred pointed to a “new theology” that “has only the unknown as object”.27 Bataille adopted this new negative theology in the context of his friendship with Maurice Blanchot and so indirectly Blanchot’s other lifelong friend –​ Levinas. Like the surrealists, Blanchot opposed modern ideas of subjectivity and reason. In his view, far from authors shaping language to express meaning, authors are absent and passive while language and the unconscious produce meaning –​he too was an aficionado of automatic writing. Blanchot avoided linear reasoning that aimed at closure, favoring an elliptical style full of associative resonances, ambiguities, and circularity. He defended this style of writing in a debate with Sartre long before Barthes did. Sartre opened the debate by advocating a littérature engagée in overt opposition to Bataille, surrealism, 26

G. Bataille, The Accursed Share, Vol. 2: Sovereignty, trans. R. Hurley (New York: Zone Books, 1988), p. 343. 27 Bataille, Inner Experience, p. 102.

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and the aesthetes.28 Blanchot replied in 1948 in Critique, a journal edited by Bataille, that the gap between words and their referents showed the open-​ ended nature of meaning and the ambiguous nature of language.29 Blanchot here distinguished literature, which acknowledges ambiguity, from everyday language, which proceeds as if names and their referents are identical with each other. He suggested that everyday language might be right to hide ambiguity in order to bring us peace. Nonetheless, he continued, honest writers will adopt a literature that parades its own ambiguity, deceit, and mystery; they will avoid the engagement with the world that Sartre had proposed. Blanchot argued that language cannot have unambiguous and closed meanings, so people should embrace ambiguity, the absence of meaning, and silence. For Blanchot, the concept of silence conveyed an apocalyptic vision of unalienated freedom rising out of the destruction of self, reason, and hierarchy. At times he associated this mystical and messianic ideal with an ethic of revolution. He wrote, “every time that a true revolution is carried out, a void is produced in which there shines for an instant, with the brilliance of the absolute that belongs to it and the terror that is in this brilliance, something like the pure presence of philosophy”; and yet such a revolution has “an attraction so strong it becomes vertiginous, a revulsion that becomes horror”, for “one cannot look the philosophical sun in the face”.30 Even as Blanchot denied the possibility of pure presence as evoked by metaphysicians, he evoked a quasi-​metaphysics associated with negativity, silence, absence, a void. Blanchot suggested, with Levinas, that our relations to others arise in this void. The opening to language is a quasi-​metaphysical condition of our relations with one another and our own subjectivity. Elsewhere, however, Blanchot shifted attention away from Levinas’s idea of responsibility for an absent other and towards the nature of our being with others in friendship and community. He wanted to describe being with others in ways that avoided the pure presences and identifiable relations he associated with metaphysics. In his view, our being-​with-​others reflected negativity, silence, and absence. He described friendship as impossible because it involved meeting the unknown in the other. He described community as unavowable because it could not remain open to the other if it had a content one might avow.

28 29 30

J-​P. Sartre, What is Literature? (London: Routledge, 2001). M. Blanchot, “Literature and the Right to Death”, in The Work of Fire, trans. C. Mandell (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995), pp. 300–​344. M. Blanchot, Friendship, trans. E. Rottenberg (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997), p. 87.

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Blanchot is, with Levinas, an author for whom Derrida expressed much sympathy. Derrida’s doubts about Levinas’s notion of absolute alterity echo those that led Blanchot to stress our being-​with others in an unavowable community based on an impossible friendship. One of the first texts in which Derrida began explicitly to address ethics and politics was a lecture on “The Politics of Friendship” given to the American Philosophical Association in 1988. This lecture explicitly referenced Blanchot, notably in a lengthy and admiring final footnote.31 Elsewhere, Derrida described his own “messianism without religion” by telling Blanchot’s story of a beggar who recognizes the Messiah and asks Him, “when will you come”, for even if the Messiah were here, he must still in some sense be yet to come.32 Derrida’s complaint that Foucault could not reclaim an authentic madness without adopting a repressive metaphysics of presence thus echoes the avant-​garde concern that if sites and strategies of resistance have content then bourgeois society can take them over. Foucault responded in a manner that echoed surrealism and, as I will argue, situationism. He tried to identify sites and strategies that have a situational quality such that they do not have the kind of content that might be taken over. But it is always possible to worry that even sites and strategies with a situational quality might be absorbed by bourgeois society in so far as they have traces of positive content and simple presences. Derrida responded to this worry in a manner that echoed Levinas and Blanchot. He located ethics in a quasi-​metaphysics of absence and alterity. 3

Postmodern Radicalism

Although Foucault accepted Derrida’s argument that the very act of writing a history of madness entails imposing reason on it, he argued strongly against what he viewed as Derrida’s reduction of practices to texts.33 Foucault complained that when Derrida read texts to expose the conditions of possibility of language and thought, he failed to allow properly for their status as events located in particular relations of power. According to Foucault, Derrida’s concern with textual traces neglects the extra-​textual world of social relations. At least one commentator claims that Foucault shifted his position around 1977 from an avant-​garde one that approached social issues through a concern with language to one that approached language and reason through a concern with 31 32 33

J. Derrida, “The Politics of Friendship”, Journal of Philosophy 85 (1988), 633–​44. Caputo, “Conversation with Jacques Derrida”, in Deconstruction in a Nutshell, p. 24. M. Foucault, “My Body, This Paper, This Fire”, Oxford Literary Review 4 (1979), 9–​28.

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historical relations of power.34 However, while Foucault’s position undoubtedly changed, we should not underestimate the extent to which avant-​garde movements considered relations of power. Dada and surrealism adopted sites and strategies with which to promote an unalienated alternative to bourgeois society. Further, other avant-​garde movements, notably situationism, distanced themselves from surrealism in ways that foreshadowed Foucault’s response to Derrida; they focused on social relations, not culture or language. The Situationist International was formed in 1957. Its members argued that their avant-​garde predecessors had been too preoccupied with cultural values, for a new culture could emerge only after “the triumph of the revolutionary movement”.35 The situationists drew on Marxist themes in an attempt to overcome what they took to be the limitations of Dada and surrealism. Guy Debord gave the spectacle a prominent place in situationist theory.36 The spectacle refers to the symbolic order of images and signs found in art, the media, and consumer society. Debord suggested that the alienation Marx had associated with capitalist production permeated all bourgeois society including the symbolic order of the spectacle. In his view, capitalist society embodies false images of labor and need. People perform alienating work and consume inauthentic commodities in processes that remove them from the immediate, p ­ layful world of true desire. The spectacle reduces individuals to passive observers whose only choices are inauthentic ones provided by the spectacle itself. Although consumer society appears to offer varied goods, activities, and entertainments, it offers them only in the form of commodities, thereby preventing people from making an authentic choice for the real. As Debord explained, “it is only inasmuch as individual reality is not that it is allowed to appear”.37 Debord and the other situationists followed the avant-​garde in stressing the ubiquity and recuperative power of the spectacle. They ascribed to the spectacle the ability to absorb radical gestures. The spectacle could colonize subversive acts, turning them from fragments of authenticity into spectacles to be witnessed. It could remove their radical import, reproducing them as commodities and prepatterned lifestyles. Equally, the situationists insisted, as 34

J. Rajchman, Michel Foucault: The Freedom of Philosophy (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985). 35 P. Canjuers and G. Debord, “Preliminaries Toward Defining a Unitary Revolutionary Program”, in K. Knabb, ed., Situationist International Anthology (Berkeley: Bureau of Public Secrets, 1981), p. 309. 36 G. Debord, The Society of the Spectacle (Detroit: Black and Red, 1977). Later he suggested a sinister, shadowy group controlled the spectacle. See G. Debord, Comments on the Society of the Spectacle (Sheffield: Pirate, 1988). 37 Debord, Society of the Spectacle, 17.

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had Dada and surrealism, on the possibility of an alternative, authentic society. They believed that people always could find a point from which to oppose the spectacle because capitalism itself needed people to have some awareness of the authentic reality it distorted. Raoul Vaneigem even suggested that the spectacle was fast approaching a crisis from which a new society of radical subjectivity and true pleasure would emerge.38 The situationists defended the possibility of an authentic society by presenting alienation and recuperation as results of commodification. In their view, the destruction of the commodity form would give people unmediated relations to objects in an integrated society. The world would still create divisions and challenges, but people would confront these directly, not as alienated commodities. Finally, the situationists argued, as had Dada and surrealism, that the danger of recuperation meant that revolutionaries had to rely on spontaneous interventions of a situational nature to disrupt the spectacle. They hoped to glimpse a truer reality through playful performances that bring fantasy into ordinary life, transgressions that fragment bourgeois norms, and eruptions of the extraordinary in the everyday. In their view, the people who make these interventions begin to take direct control of their lives and so experience moments of authenticity, and the people who witness these interventions experience a shock that can loosen the hold of the spectacle on them and so lead them to similar moments of authenticity. Foucault’s response to Derrida led him to promote avant-​garde sites and strategies for disrupting relations of power. These sites and strategies also attracted other postmodern radicals, notably Baudrillard and Lyotard. Baudrillard drew in his For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign on Debord’s analysis of the impact of commodification on signification.39 Later he praised Bataille’s notion of aesthetic excess for being able to avoid the structures it criticizes in a way Marxism cannot.40 Lyotard explicitly defended an avant-​garde aesthetic of the sublime.41 The intellectual debt of postmodernists to the avant-​ garde also appears in their organizational affiliations. As Barthes and Foucault were associated with Tel Quel, so Lyotard and Baudrillard were active alongside Debord in Socialisme ou Barbarie, a journal associated with situationism.

38 R. Vaneigem, The Revolution of Everyday Life, trans. J. Fullerton and P. Siveking (London: Rising Free Collective, 1979). 39 J. Baudrillard, For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign, trans. C. Levin (St. Louis: Telos Press, 1972). 40 J. Baudrillard, The Mirror of Production (St. Louis: Telos Press, 1975). 41 J-​F. Lyotard, “The Sublime and the Avant-​Garde”, Art Forum 22 (1984), 36–​43.

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Baudrillard, Foucault, and Lyotard continued to appeal to the sites and strategies of the avant-​garde. These postmodern radicals followed the avant-​ garde in identifying the body and desire as sites of pleasure and authenticity located outside of bourgeois society and the patterns of subjectivity it prescribes. Foucault tried to do so by distinguishing subjectivity from the body. Lyotard similarly rejected the idea of a natural self while arguing that capitalism and instrumental reasoning construct egos that assert a reality principle and thwart the flow of desire. He introduced desire or libidinal energy as a site of unchanneled existence from which people might challenge bourgeois society.42 Postmodern radicals could appeal to the body and desire as sites of resistance to domination only by depriving them of all substantive content. After all, if the body had substantive content, it would be a subject –​a determination of consciousness –​infused by power. Typically, therefore, postmodern radicals denied that avant-​garde sites of resistance had substantive content. For example, Lyotard defined the sublime as that which “puts forward the unpresentable in presentation itself; that which denies the solace of good forms, the consensus of a taste which would make it possible to share collectively the nostalgia for the unattainable; that which searches for new presentations, not in order to enjoy them but in order to impart a stronger sense of the unpresentable”.43 The postmodern radicals also followed avant-​garde strategies for disrupting the spectacle while avoiding being absorbed by it. Sometimes they tied subversion and freedom to unrepeatable singularities. Baudrillard appealed to “the poetic singularity of the analysis”, suggesting that only a singular event that remains outside the generalizing discourse of reason can avoid being integrated into the spectacle.44 Lyotard similarly championed forms of knowledge that respect the singularity of an event instead of incorporating it in a general scheme. At other times postmodern radicals suggested that excess has a special authenticity and power of subversion. Excess possesses a blatant artificiality in contrast to the veneer of naturalness cloaking bourgeois norms. Baudrillard hoped to unsettle the spectacle by an excessive and ridiculous embrace of it. He suggested that people push the system into a hyperlogic by saying, “you want us to consume –​O.K., let’s consume always more, and anything whatsoever; for any useless and absurd purpose”.45 At yet other times postmodern 42 43 44 45

J-​F. Lyotard, Libidinal Economy, trans. I. Grant (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993). J-​F. Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), p. 340. J. Baudrillard, The Perfect Crime, trans. C. Turner (London: Verso, 1996), p. 103. J. Baudrillard, In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities: or, the End of the Social and Other Essays (New York: Semiotext(e), 1983), p. 46.

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radicals advocated forms of self-​creation modeled on the dandyism of the aesthetes. Foucault appealed to Baudelaire as an exemplar of self-​invention and the aesthetics of existence. Finally, the postmodern radicals advocated transgression of current limits while arguing that the content of these transgressions should vary with time and place. Foucault proposed hyperbolically that Bataille’s concept of transgression act as the master-​concept for a new era of the unthought. He wrote, transgression will “seem as decisive for our culture, as much a part of its soil, as the experience of contradiction was at an earlier time for dialectical thought”.46 Lyotard similarly argued that the sublime and the just arise from perpetual transgressions that negate established norms. He believed that justice “consists in working at the limits of what the rules permit, in order to invent new moves, perhaps new rules and therefore new games”.47 Although Baudrillard and the other postmodern radicals remained faithful to the sites and strategies of situationism, they came to believe its time was past. They did so for reasons echoing Derrida’s critique of Foucault’s history of madness. They rejected the real. They argued that the situationists could not explain how people can have authentic experiences when the spectacle is all-​ pervasive. Representation always obscures reality. People cannot get behind representations to postulate the real and authentic experience. The postmodern radicals suspected that the ubiquity of the spectacle and power precluded a revolutionary standpoint that avoids entrapment in them. These suspicions surfaced when Lyotard broke with Socialisme ou Barbarie in 1964. They gained additional piquancy from the impact of Derrida and, even more importantly, the events of May 1968. When established revolutionary groups then protected their position from the disruptive voices of the rebels, they appeared to lend credence to the idea that theories of revolutionary praxis are exercises of power, not expressions of authenticity; theory seemed inevitably to quiet difference. Further, the experience of the rebels in challenging hierarchies in sexual relations and football teams as well as industrial relations and politics reinforced the suggestion that the spectacle lacks a hidden monolithic source; power seemed to function differently on the surface of various practices. It was in the wake of May 1968 that Foucault voiced the postmodern critique of situationism. He argued that situationism did not “liberate difference” so much as “guarantee that it will always be recuperated”; “you think you are seeing the 46 M. Foucault, “A Preface to Transgression”, in Language, Counter-​Memory, Practice, p. 33. Also see M. Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (London: Tavistock Publishers, 1970), chap. 9. 47 J-​F. Lyotard with J-​L. Thébaud, Just Gaming (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), p. 100.

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subversion of the other declaring itself, but in secret, contradiction is working for the salvation of the identical”.48 The postmodern radicals were emphatic in their rejection of the real. For them, there was only the transparent, superficial world of representation, modern consumer society, and power. For them, it did not make sense to appeal to an authentic reality beyond or beneath such things. It did not even make sense to describe things as alienated in a way that presupposes an authentic alternative. We already have encountered the poststructuralists’ rejection of the real and their related insistence that there is only the transparent surface of things. In the last chapter, we encountered the rejection of the real in their claim that meaning derives from the play of signifiers. They rejected all appeals to stable referents or structural logics as a reality behind this play. In this chapter, we encountered it in their ethics. After Foucault gave up the idea of recovering an authentic and real experience at sites such as madness, he began appealing to the body defined in contrast to the subject. More generally still, he began to devise a concept of power as ubiquitous rather than a distortion beyond or beneath which we can glimpse the real. Foucault appealed to Friedrich Nietzsche’s suggestion that “each society has its regime of truth, its ‘general politics’ of truth; that is, the types of discourse which it accepts and makes function as true”.49 In this view, truth and the subject are not sites of authenticity, but functions of a will to power. The other postmodern radicals also rejected the real. Baudrillard’s concept of the hyperreal and Lyotard’s concept of a terror of truth resemble Foucault’s concept of a regime of power in that they too depict the spectacle as all there is. Baudrillard was ambiguous about the philosophical status of the real. He wrote about how objects function as pure signs in modern consumer societies, leaving it unclear whether there have been (or might be) societies in which reality is distinct from representations and so free of the taint of power. According to Baudrillard, the proliferation of signs has created a hyper-​reality devoid of real meaning and value. The world has become an effect of the sign; “the process of signification is, at bottom, nothing but a gigantic simularion model of meaning”.50 Baudrillard argued that there are no originals behind the constantly proliferating images. Everything is a copy of a copy, a simulation of a simulation, a representation of a representation. He also suggested that the absence of originals behind the copies undermines metaphors of depth and ideas of authenticity. He rejected “the sign of alienation” and the “society of the 48 M. Foucault, “Theatrum Philosophicum”, Critique 26 (1970), 889. 49 M. Foucault, “Truth and Power”, in Power/​Knowledge, p. 131. 50 Baudrillard, Political Economy of the Sign, p. 91.

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spectacle” in favor of a postmodern perspective in which “there is no longer a scene [for] everything becomes inexorably transparent”.51 Lyotard similarly defined a postmodern “incredulity towards metanarratives” –​truths that underlie a civilization and purport to be universal.52 He argued that all claims to knowledge are valid only in specific language-​games. Language-​games “define what has the right to be said and done in the culture in question”, and they can be supported only by self-​referential appeals to themselves.53 Lyotard concluded that any appeal to the real involves a terror of truth; a particular narrative seeks to destroy others by claiming it is true. He asked radicals: “where do you criticise from? Don’t you see that criticising is still knowing, knowing better? That the critical relation still falls within the sphere of knowledge, of realisation and thus of the assumption of power?”54 Postmodern radicalism is thus characterized by a simultaneous adoption of avant-​garde strategies and rejection of avant-​garde notions of the real. The question is whether it is reasonable to remain faithful to the strategies after giving up on the ideal they were supposed to serve. The avant-​garde adopted their sites and strategies as a means of glimpsing and promoting an unalienated form of life. If postmodern radicals no longer believe in such a possibility, what reason can they have for remaining faithful to those sites and strategies? Surely we are not to valorize the sites and strategies as good in and of themselves? Such questions point toward two aporias that beset postmodern ­ethics. The first is that their rejection of the real leads them to challenge all ethical claims in a way that seems to preclude their properly justifying their own positions. If all reason is an illegitimate product of the spectacle, how can the postmodernists defend their ethic? Surely their calls for transgression, self-​creation, constant novelty, and blatant simulation must be products of regimes of power/​knowledge or particular language games just as much as must any other ethic? The second aporia is that their rejection of the real leads them to define subjectivity as a product of the spectacle in a way that precludes the possibility of the subject having a free or authentic experience. If the subject cannot break out of the spectacle, what is the point of transgression, self-​creation, or constant novelty? Surely any apparent transgression or novelty actually must be a product of the spectacle itself rather than a moment of authenticity or resistance?

51 J. Baudrillard, Fatal Strategies (New York: Semiotext(e), 1990), p. 67. 52 Lyotard, Postmodern Condition, p. xxiv. 53 Lyotard, Postmodern Condition, p. 23. 54 J-​F. Lyotard, “Adrift”, in Driftworks (New York: Semiotext(e), 1984), p. 13.

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Conclusion

Postmodernism emerged when poststructuralists and others reworked the avant-​garde tradition by rejecting the idea of an unalienated reality. Postmodernisms relationship to the avant-​grade tradition does much to explain its characteristic responses to the modern problems of knowledge and subjectivity, that is, in ethical terms, justification and freedom. There are significant differences among the postmodernists. One difference is that between the postmodern radicals who still advocated specific sites and strategies of resistance and those such as Derrida who turned to a quasi-​metaphysics of absence and alterity. Other differences appear among the sites and strategies favored by the former. For example, Foucault advocated self-​creation and transgression whereas Lyotard tied a broadly similar ethic to a pagan and republican politics. Despite the differences between the postmodernists, however, they share common themes that enable us to regard them as a loose group. Several of these themes reflect their shared location against the background of the avant-​garde. The avant-​garde wanted to promote an authentic alternative to the alienation of bourgeois society. To do so, they adopted sites and strategies that could avoid what they took to be the totalizing and recuperative properties of bourgeois society. They often looked to sites that could be defined as outside of bourgeois rationality, sites such as the irrational, madness, the erotic, and the taboo. And they often looked to strategies that could be defined without reference to any fixed content, strategies such as self-​creation and transgression. Postmodern radicals such as Baudrillard, Lyotard, and Foucault adopted many of these sites and strategies as possible ways of resisting the spectacle and modern power. Ironically, however, the postmodern radicals rejected the very possibility of the kind of authentic society that the avant-​garde had hoped to promote by means of these sites and strategies. Their rejection of the very idea of escaping the spectacle and modern power explains the ambiguities in their responses to the questions of justification and freedom. On the one hand, they sometimes seem to be justifying various sites and strategies by equating them with resistance to power and the attainment of freedom and self-​mastery. On the other, they reject the very possibility of escaping power thereby implying that even these sites and strategies and so any self we create through them should be seen as an effect of power. Derrida’s critique of Foucault pointed toward this ambiguity in postmodern radicalism. For Derrida, the sites and strategies of the avant-​garde cannot help us to resist power or attain some kind of self-​mastery because they too are entangled in language and reason. Given that the postmodern radicals shared

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Derrida’s rejection of the real, they could not properly treat sites or strategies as allegedly giving us access to a more authentic mode of being. When Derrida came to address ethics directly, he spent considerable time exploring the idea that ethical demands such as giving and hospitality are aporetic; ethical demands are possible only because they are also impossible. Derrida here echoed avant-​garde writers, such as Blanchot, who appealed to a negative theology. Derrida justified ethics (or perhaps we should say, conceived of ethics) in terms of a quasi-​metaphysics that instantiated not freedom and self-​ mastery but a responsibility to the other. Still, we might ask: did Derrida avoid the ambiguities of postmodern radicalism? If a quasi-​metaphysics of absence and impossibility has some content and gives rise to some ethics, perhaps it is not so different from any other metaphysics. If it does not have any content, perhaps it is less a clever paradox than a mystical smokescreen for an attempt to cling to avant-​garde concepts such as the unknowable even after one has renounced the constructive ideals that the avant-​garde associated with those concepts.

pa rt 2 Philosophy

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chapter 5

On Knowledge In Modern thought, Man often appears as a being who adopts particular representations of the world in specific historical contexts. This concept of Man raises dilemmas of knowledge and subjectivity. Can people transcend the particular representations they craft? Can they gain knowledge of the world as it is and of ethical values? Can people transcend their historical contexts? Can they act as agents and gain freedom? After the chapter on modernity traced the rise of the dilemmas of knowledge and subjectivity, the chapter on structuralism explored poststructuralist responses to them. The poststructuralists suspended or actively rejected the possibility of people having knowledge of the world. They argued that concepts never can refer. Concepts necessarily have an unstable content based solely on their relations to other concepts. The poststructuralists also suspended or actively rejected the possibility of agency. They argued that actions are not products of people’s beliefs and desires. Actions are mere effects of quasi-​ structures identified with social languages and the unconscious. However, the chapter on structuralism also cast doubt on poststructuralist responses to the dilemmas of knowledge and subjectivity. Their responses draw on a structuralist tradition with its idea of langue. This tradition arose as a methodological attempt to craft a science of linguistics, not a philosophical attempt to analyze meaning and action. Because the poststructuralists rejected the structuralist vision of science, they had no reason to cling to the idea of langue. Had they rejected the idea of langue, they might have opened the way to alternative ways of thinking about knowledge and subjectivity. The philosophical chapters present my alternative to postmodern accounts of knowledge and subjectivity. This chapter rejects quasi-​structuralist accounts of langue for an analysis of language as meaning in use. Although I agree with the poststructuralists that people ascribe content to concepts only against the background of their particular theories, I argue that these theories still enable people to give experiential content to concepts. Similarly, although the influence of background theories on experiences means knowledge is never completely certain, people still have shared facts with which they can justify ascribing objectivity to some truth-​claims. The following chapter will offer an alternative to postmodern accounts of subjectivity. Although postfoundationalism undermines belief in autonomy, a rejection of the structuralist tradition allows for a defense of situated agency. Finally, the chapter on the human

© Mark Bevir, 2022 | DOI:10.1163/9789004513556_006

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sciences will draw on my analyses of knowledge and subjectivity to provide an alternative to postmodern approaches to the study of Man. Collectively the philosophical chapters defend a postfoundational historicism and humanism. They suggest that the human sciences offer provisional knowledge of how people acted innovatively against the background of historical traditions. This postfoundational historicism and humanism provided the philosophical inspiration for the historical chapters, which explained modern thought, structuralism, and the avant-​garde as products of individuals actively responding to dilemmas that arose against the background of their inherited traditions. Later my postfoundational historicism and humanism will inspire the ethical chapters, which offer alternatives to postmodern accounts of ethical values and human freedom. Before turning to ethics, however, I will explore the nature of knowledge, subjectivity, and the human sciences. The chapter on structuralism highlighted the influence of Jacques Derrida’s critique of structuralism on poststructuralist accounts of meaning and truth. Derrida denounced philosophy as logocentric; it was a discourse of reason based on a misplaced faith in stable meanings and objective truths. According to Derrida, neither meanings nor truths are simply present to consciousness. He argued that concepts are metaphorical; their content depends on their relation to one another not brute facts. Derrida’s critique of logocentrism precluded his defending a set of propositions using a discourse of reason he opposed. Instead, he typically expressed his beliefs through readings of other texts. One way to tackle the postmodern response to the problem of knowledge is, therefore, to study Derrida’s readings of Ferdinand de Saussure and Edmund Husserl. 1

Saussure and Meaning

Much of modern thought confronts the question: how can people transcend the representations they craft and so get knowledge of the world as it is? This question suggests that epistemological issues about knowledge depend on issues of meaning. Much modern thought thus equates truth with a proper relationship between a sign and that to which the sign refers. Truth appears to consist of a proper relationship between propositions and experiential facts. In contrast, postmodernists suspend or reject concepts of true and objective knowledge by arguing that signs and propositions never can refer to objects outside language. In their view, the possibility of knowledge fails with the possibility of a reality outside language or at least of people having access to such

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a reality. “Reality does not exist” because “language is all there is”, explained Michel Foucault while discussing the virtues of anti-​realist literature.1 When Derrida famously proclaimed “there is nothing outside of the text”, he too was arguing that there is nothing outside the text for us.2 (Mind you, to say there is nothing outside the text for us is perhaps in effect to say there is nothing outside the text.) Derrida argued that language cannot represent the world, so people cannot have knowledge of a world beyond language. In his view, words lack stable meanings, so they cannot refer; words do not refer to fixed concepts, so they cannot embody knowledge of the world. Derrida here disrupted meanings in a way that points to an anti-​realist skepticism. He argued that signification always entails an element of difference, for whenever people tie a signifier to a signified, the nature of the signifier and the signified depends on an absent other –​something other than itself. In this view, people cannot say what a signifier refers to without evoking an absent, and once they evoke an absent, they cannot say what that absent refers to without evoking another absent, and so on. As Derrida explains: It is because of différance that the movement of signification is possible only if each so-​called ‘present’ element, each element appearing on the scene of presence, is related to something other than itself, thereby keeping within itself the mark of the past element, and already letting itself be vitiated by the mark of its relation to the future element, this trace being related no less to what is called the future than to what is called the past, and constituting the present by means of this very relation to what it is not.3 Derrida rejected stable meanings on the grounds that signifiers and signifieds depend on what they are not. He implied that the differential nature of the sign destabilizes meaning in a way that precludes people breaking out of an endless play of signifiers. Derrida adopted a differential view of the sign in his reading of Saussure. As I discussed in the chapter on structuralism, Saussure thought of language as an abstract system of signs in which each sign joins a signifier (or form) with a signified (or concept). In this view, signs are arbitrary and differential 1 M. Foucault, “Débat sur le Roman”, Tel Quel 17 (1964), 45. 2 J. Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. G. Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), p. 163. 3 J. Derrida, “Différance”, in Margins of Philosophy, trans. A. Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), p. 13.

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in two respects. First, signifiers are purely differential because their link to signifieds is arbitrary. People could use the signified /​tet/​instead of /​pet/​to refer to “a tamed animal kept as a favorite” provided only that /​tet/​differed from other signifiers. Second, signifieds are as arbitrary and differential as signifiers. People experience reality as an undifferentiated continuum that they could divide in all kinds of ways using all kinds of sets of signifieds. Saussure denied that concepts are defined by their referents conceived as kinds found in the world. He implied, instead, that concepts are defined by their differences from one another. Concepts slice up the flux of experience arbitrarily. When Derrida read Saussure, he took the arbitrary and differential nature of the sign for granted. He concentrated, as I mentioned in the chapter on structuralism, on challenging what he called Saussure’s phonocentrism, that is, the privileging of speech above writing.4 For Derrida, “speech” stands for stable meanings, and “writing” stands for the undermining of stable meanings. A strong faith in speech goes with a belief in people’s ability clearly to grasp meanings; speakers know what they mean. A fear of writing suggests a neglect of everything that unsettles the link between a statement and its meaning; people wonder what written texts mean. Derrida then argued that Saussure constantly treated writing as a lesser form of speech. For example, Saussure used phonology as a model for linguistics, and described phonetic scripts as superior to alternatives such as hieroglyphs. According to Derrida, Saussure’s phonocentrism neglected the disruptive effects of writing. Derrida’s point was that Saussure treated the sign as a fluid construct except when he introduced a stable link between signifier and signified typified in speech. Derrida also argued that several passages in Saussure’s own text question the existence of this stable link. Derrida claimed that these passages reveal the logical course of the differential nature of the sign. They show how a differential view of the sign makes language or langue, and so writing, crucial for speech or parole. They show that parole can occur only in systems of differences without positive terms, where such systems resemble the idea of writing as the sign of a sign. Indeed, Saussure explicitly noticed this resemblance when he used writing as a metaphor to explain the nature of langue. Derrida concluded that although Saussure wrote that he wanted to exclude writing from linguistics, his own text shows he had to use writing as a metaphor to make his argument. Saussure’s text reveals the centrality of writing in a way that undermines his stated belief in a stable link between signifier and signified.

4 Derrida, Grammatology, pp. 27–​73.

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For Derrida, the ubiquity of writing implies that all meaning is problematic. As he explained, within every system, there comes a point “where the signifier can no longer be replaced by its signified, so that in consequence no signifier can be replaced, purely and simply”.5 In this view, because signifiers are not tied clearly to signifieds, every use of a signifier resembles writing. Every use of a signifier raises as a genuine problem the question: what does it refer to? Derrida argued here that signification is necessarily opaque. All signs resemble writing. Expression is always separate from meaning. Derrida thus concluded that language is never a transparent medium for consciousness. Because signifiers never map directly on to signifieds, any attempt to say what a signifier signifies must leave something out. Hence there are no stable meanings. Perhaps Derrida is right. Perhaps the differential nature of the sign implies that signifiers are not tied to fixed signifieds so there are no stable meanings just an endless play of signifiers. Nonetheless, even if Derrida is right, his conclusion would follow only given an acceptance of Saussure’s differential view of the sign. Derrida took as given a view of the sign that I think is mistaken. As I discussed in the chapter on structuralism, Saussure introduced his differential account of the signified to postulate langue as the proper object of a science of linguistics. Because Saussure wanted to define langue as a self-​ contained system, he could not identify its individual parts by their relationship to things beyond that system. His account of the signified rested not on a philosophical argument but on the methodological gesture by which he hoped to create a science of linguistics. The case for a differential theory of meaning relies, therefore, not on philosophical arguments but on the evidence provided by examples such as color concepts. However, this evidence shows only that some concepts form a continuum that people might divide in another way. It shows only that some concepts refer to a continuum, so people know what part of the continuum a concept refers to if they know what part the others do not refer to. The example of color concepts does not show that all concepts are purely differential. On the contrary, some concepts might not form a continuum, and even when concepts form a continuum, people might know what one refers to even if they do not grasp the others. Derrida relied implicitly on an unwarranted leap. He moved from showing that some signifieds are differential to the conclusion that all signifieds are purely differential. The unwarranted nature of this move appears in two problems with a purely differential theory of meaning. The first problem is that concepts can be defined positively as well as differentially even when they form a 5 Derrida, Grammatology, p. 266.

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continuum. The possibility of defining color concepts negatively as not-​one-​ another does not preclude the possibility of defining them positively by their referents. Consider pupils whom we want to teach the meaning of the term “red”. Imagine that we tell them an object is red if and only if the light it reflects lies within a given range of the color spectrum. Imagine that we give them an instrument to measure the nature of the light given off by any particular object. Under these circumstances, pupils could identify red objects without any difficulty. They could fix the meaning of red by knowing what objects red refers to, and they could do so even if they did not know the meaning of other color concepts. Thus, people do not have to define red differentially. They can define red positively as the color seen at a particular band of the spectrum. Red is a relational concept; its meaning depends on its relation to the theory of color. But red is not a purely differential concept; its meaning does not consist only of a contrast between it and other color concepts. Clearly people still can say that red is the part of the color spectrum that is not-​blue, not-​green, and so on. However, they can do so because the theory of color implies color concepts form a continuous spectrum; color comes from light which itself forms a continuous spectrum. People can equate red with not-​blue, not-​green, and so on because of a fact about the world –​that light forms a continuous spectrum –​not a fact about meaning –​that all signifieds gain content only from their differences with one another. The second problem with a purely differential theory of meaning is that most concepts do not form a continuum. When concepts do not form a continuum, they cannot be defined differentially. Most concepts can be defined only positively. Consider, for example, the signified malaria. No doubt we cannot teach pupils the meaning of malaria solely by pointing to examples and saying “malaria”. But our inability to do so implies only that the meaning of malaria depends on background theories about the world; it does not imply that the meaning of malaria depends on its difference from other concepts. Malaria is a relational concept but not a purely differential concept. Indeed, malaria can be defined positively as the fever caused by the presence in the body of the protozoan parasite of genus Plasmodium. To accept this definition, people need only to accept a theory about the cause of certain physical symptoms. Here too people can bind a signified to its referent in a context of theories composed of other signifieds. This time, however, the relevant theories preclude a differential definition of malaria akin to that which people can give of red. People could say only that malaria means something like “not the absence of a certain parasite”. Malaria is not a differential signified, just a relational one. Derrida’s purely differential theory of meaning rests on a false dichotomy. He implies that because individual signifieds do not have a context-​independent

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link to their referents, the only possibility is to define them negatively as different from one another. But there is another possibility, as demonstrated by my examples of “red” and “malaria”. People can define signifieds positively in terms of experiences, where their understanding of the experiences depends on the theories they hold true. When Derrida writes, “the absence of the transcendental signified extends the domain and the play of signification infinitely”, he ignores the possibility that theories provide a way of ending such play without appealing to a transcendental signified.6 There is no reason to assume the absence of a one-​to-​one correspondence between signifieds and their referents entails the absence of any correspondence whatsoever. That an isolated signified cannot refer to reality does not imply that it cannot refer to reality in the context of other signifieds. On the contrary, the positive relations between signifieds enable them to refer to reality. Derrida errs when he says “language is entirely intertextual –​words refer to one another in wholly contingent manners without touching any trans-​linguistic reality”.7 Perhaps Derrida’s critique of stable meanings rests not only on his analysis of the signified but also the practices of deconstruction by which he unsettled meanings. However, the practices Derrida used to unsettle meanings all depend on his purely differential theory of meaning and so fail with it. Derrida used deconstruction and the like to suggest that arguments for stable meanings undermine themselves. Now, an argument might undermine itself in two different ways. First, the content of an argument might contain a logical contradiction. Such contradictions trouble all philosophers. Second, the performance or mode of an argument might contradict its content. Many of the practices associated with deconstruction explore this type of contradiction. However, Derrida’s justification for worrying about this type of contradiction depends on a purely differential theory of meaning. Only if there are no stable signifieds will people treat signifiers as akin to signifieds. Only if there are no stable meanings will people treat the mode of an argument as being of a piece with its content. If there are stable meanings, people will consider the validity of an argument as somewhat independent of its performance. Thus, to argue that signifieds are not differential is also to undermine those practices of reading that seek to problematize meaning simply by pointing to a contradiction between what a text says and how it says it. Derrida could problematize meaning only by pointing to contradictions in the content of all arguments for stable meanings, which is something he did not try to do. 6 J. Derrida, “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences”, in Writing and Difference, trans A. Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), p. 280. 7 Derrida, Grammatology, p. 50.

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I can show how Derrida’s practices of deconstruction fail along with his purely differential theory of meaning by returning to his reading of Saussure. Derrida highlighted an alleged contradiction between the content and performance of Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics. Derrida implied that Saussure undermined his own argument for the priority of speech above writing when he explained the nature of speech by reference to writing. But where is the contradiction? Saussure believed that speech is prior to writing, and he explored features of speech using an analogy to a widespread concept of writing. People can use one thing to explain another without committing themselves to the priority of the latter over the former. So, if Saussure was doing just that, he did not contradict himself in a way that undermines his argument. Contradictions undermine an argument only when they appear in its content. As it happens, Derrida pointed to just such a contradiction in Saussure’s argument. Derrida suggested that the doctrine of the arbitrary nature of the sign undermines any belief in a stable link between signifiers and signifieds. However, even if Derrida were right here, he would have shown only that the attempt to bind signifiers to signifieds is incompatible with the Saussurean belief that signs are arbitrary. Derrida would not have undermined alternative, non-​Saussurean attempts to tie signifiers to signifieds. He would not have shown that meanings are inherently unstable. On the contrary, a relational theory of meaning allows people to bind signifiers to signifieds in a given theoretical context in the way I have just suggested. We have stable meanings; it is just that their stability arises in part from our theories. 2

Husserl and Truth

Derrida drew on his rejection of stable meanings to query the possibility of truth and objective knowledge. Derrida wrote, “the dream at the heart of philosophy” is to bring the play of signifiers to an end by appealing to “the assured legibility of the proper”.8 In this view, philosophy instantiates a myth of presence; it is a search for something that is given as true to consciousness and thus able to provide knowledge with a secure foundation. However, Derrida continued, because there are no stable meanings, nothing can be a given fact or simple presence, so there are no secure foundations on which to ground truth-​claims. Derrida thus concluded that the dream of philosophy can never

8 Derrida, “White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy”, in Margins of Philosophy, p. 268.

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be fulfilled; there are no stable meanings; nothing is given to consciousness and nothing can secure truth-​claims. This deconstruction of truth initially appeared in Derrida’s reading of Husserl. Husserl used phenomenology to explore the objects of consciousness. He took consciousness as the starting point for philosophical inquiry because it is the one thing that people cannot deny. As I mentioned in the chapter on structuralism, Husserl believed that philosophers could examine things in themselves by bracketing-​off all assumptions about a world beyond consciousness. He argued that phenomenology could use a process of reduction to distinguish those parts of consciousness that are contingent features of particular individuals from those that characterize thought itself. Phenomenology could provide access to truths that are simply present to consciousness. Derrida argued against Husserl that no stable objects are simply present to consciousness. He made his argument by pointing to a contradiction in Husserl’s work. On the one hand, Husserl secured meaning and truth by evoking idealized objects that are indefinitely repeatable. Husserl appealed to these object as given presences that are always and everywhere the same. On the other hand, Husserl excluded errors from the subjective origins of these idealized objects by appealing to writing. Yet, according to Derrida, writing always shifts from the idealized object to a representation of it; writing undermines the idea of stable meanings. Husserl tried to resolve this contradiction by distinguishing between expressive and indicative uses of language. Expressive language carries intentional meanings that are immediately present to consciousness whereas indicative language points indirectly towards such meanings. However, Derrida rejected this distinction. He argued that writing always has an indicative character. Using Saussure’s terminology, he wrote, “whenever the immediate and full presence of the signified is concealed, the signifier will be of an indicative nature”.9 For Derrida, people cannot grasp concepts apart from the opacity of the words they use to carry them. Writing is always indicative, so it cannot secure claims to truth in the way Husserl proposed. Husserl’s idea of a pretheoretical consciousness fails given not only Derrida’s differential theory of meaning but also a relational theory of meaning. Metaphysics of presence postulate a one-​to-​one correspondence between concepts and referents. They imply that some signifieds can be tied to their referents outside all theoretical contexts. A relational theory of meaning undermines this idea. If all signifieds are relational, they necessarily require

9 J. Derrida, “Meaning as Soliloquy”, in Speech and Phenomena, and Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs, trans. D. Allison (Evanston: Northwestern University Press), p. 40.

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theoretical contexts to bind them to their referents. A relational view of meaning implies that the boundaries of a concept depend on other concepts. No concept can pick out objects without relying on other concepts. Thus, the contents of consciousness cannot be pretheoretical; they are always theory-​laden. Consider the example of the concept “red”. Husserl’s metaphysics requires some concepts to refer to objects in splendid isolation; perhaps people think of objects as red because they just see them that way. In contrast a relational theory of meaning implies that to recognize objects as red people need to master other concepts. Red is an abstract category that on its own cannot tell people which objects they should and should not place under it. All signifieds must be relational because when people identify an object as belonging under a given category they classify it in a way that presumes theories about the world. Theories are implicit in all objects that appear in consciousness. Nothing appears as a simple presence. Further, because all signifieds are relational, they can refer to objects only in theoretical contexts, so the truth-​value of any statement must depend on some background theoretical commitments. Nothing can be simply given to consciousness outside of any theoretical context. Because theoretical assumptions enter all perception, knowledge cannot possibly rest on pure descriptions of pure experiences independent of theoretical content. Phenomenologists cannot base objective knowledge solely on experiences as they appear to consciousness, for these experiences must be experiences of theoretically-​constructed objects. Because theories play an active role in making the world, the dream of philosophy fails. There is no possibility of a completely certain set of beliefs. We must accept, as Derrida puts it, that our “world is written only in the plural”.10 Derrida is right, therefore, to reject Husserl’s idea of objective knowledge as certainty. The relational nature of signifieds and the theory-​laden nature of experience imply that no fact can be an unquestionable presence. Further, the absence of given facts requires a modest epistemology that recognizes all knowledge remains uncertain. Where Derrida goes astray is in his rejection of the possibility of just such a modest epistemology or at least in his lack of attention to this possibility. Because Derrida never considers the possibility of a modest epistemology, he appears to deny all validity to knowledge. In contrast, a relational theory of meaning implies that people can have access to stable objects, where the stability of these objects depends on their theorizing. Although the theory-​laden nature of consciousness precludes people from

10

Derrida, “White Mythology”, p. 268.

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justifying knowledge as completely certain, it does not preclude more modest forms of justification. The theory-​laden nature of consciousness implies that there are no given facts. People cannot compare the content of consciousness with something else, neither the world as it is nor a quasi-​Platonic world of ideal forms. Indeed, because there are no given facts by which to judge the theory-​laden content of consciousness, knowledge cannot be absolutely certain. For a start, because no perception is given as true, the validity of knowledge cannot rest on individual facts. Instead, a body of knowledge must be justified as a whole. Objectivity must be a property of a group of theories and facts. Individual propositions can be considered objective only because they belong to an objective body of knowledge. In addition, because people cannot compare the content of consciousness with anything else, they cannot justify a body of knowledge by appealing to an external reality. People cannot say that a body of knowledge is valid because it agrees with the world as it is. The justification of a body of knowledge must arise, instead, from a comparison between it and other available groups of theories and facts. Ascription of objectivity must be a result of a comparison among rival bodies of knowledge. Finally, because knowledge cannot be absolutely certain, ascriptions of objectivity must be provisional. Whenever people conclude that a body of knowledge is objective in comparison with its rivals, they do so at a particular time. Later changes in the available bodies of knowledge may alter the results of comparisons. Because no body of knowledge can provide a full account of the world, ascriptions of objectivity are provisional results of current practices. People might come to renounce the body of knowledge they currently consider to be objective. A relational theory of meaning implies that any claim to objectivity must show how a body of knowledge meets criteria of comparison. What people take to be objective knowledge must depend not on things present to consciousness but on their activity as theorizers. For a start, theories decide what counts as an exemplary perception of an object. Although exemplary perceptions incorporate theoretical assumptions, they can still produce shared facts, where these shared facts are not truths present to consciousness but the propositions that members of a community accept as true. When shared theories assure a community of the validity of certain facts, the community can use those facts to debate the validity of the rest of their knowledge. In addition, theories give a community a normative standard by which to define a particular body of knowledge as objective. Theories provide criteria of comparison by which to decide among rival accounts of shared facts. A community might compare several competing bodies of knowledge using criteria such as: how well they fit facts, the number and range of facts they fit, their internal coherence, how

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many hypotheses they generate, the fit between these hypotheses and facts, and the boldness of these hypotheses. Finally, because the body of knowledge that people take to be objective is the one that best meets their current criteria, later developments obviously could lead them to renounce it. Objective knowledge is a product of a comparison among rival accounts of agreed facts. No doubt comparisons among competing bodies of knowledge do not always find one to be notably superior to all others. Indeed, the value of relativism is that it reminds us that these comparisons can be inconclusive. Even if an objective standpoint allows people to reject flat-​earth theories, it still might leave several other theories appearing more or less equally valid. A comparison among theories using settled criteria may remove some without yielding a clear-​cut decision among the others. Nonetheless, the absence of a clear-​cut decision does not entail anti-​rationalism. On the contrary, people can reasonably reject some theories. Further, they have a rational conclusion to the debate among the other equally valid theories. They can say that an objective standpoint is one that recognizes the equal validity of these remaining theories. The charge of anti-​rationalism lingers because my analysis of objectivity divorces it from truth. People may want a reason to accept the accuracy and reasonableness of the knowledge that their comparisons suggest is objectively valid. Because objective knowledge emerges from a social practice of comparison, the question of whether to accept its accuracy depends on the stance taken to the relevant social practices. Modern philosophy offers several reasons to accept the accuracy of the knowledge produced by these epistemic practices. Pragmatists suggest that we accept this knowledge because it works. Falsificationists suggest that we accept it because the theory of evolution gives us reason to trust the mechanisms by which we get it. Ludwig Wittgenstein would have us do so because of its role in our form of life. Perhaps a Derridean will object that all these philosophies are attempts to secure individual facts as simple presences. Personally, I read them as applying not to given facts but to the whole bodies of knowledge produced by epistemic practices. Besides, even if I am wrong, it is easy to imagine applying them to whole bodies of knowledge. Any one of them thus might provide a suitable response to postmodern anti-​rationalism. What did Derrida think about the modest epistemologies of Wittgenstein, the falsificationists, and the pragmatists? He might have remained unaware of them; but that would seem unlikely given the extent of his travels and discussions, and besides it would not provide readers with a reason to give up these epistemological attempts to justify knowledge. He might have come across them without considering them seriously; but that would have been

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uncharacteristically sloppy, and besides it too would not provide readers with a reason to give up modest epistemologies. It is possible that he considered them and decided they offered plausible analyses of justified knowledge. But surely he then would have said so. Surely instead of just exposing the impossibility of certain knowledge, he would have encouraged people to develop modest epistemologies. The other alternative is that he considered these modest epistemologies and found them wanting. He might have thought that his argument about the indeterminacy of meaning undermined them as it did Husserl’s myth of presence. However, I have argued that theoretical contexts can fix signifieds, so modest epistemologies do not fail with the idea of truth as complete certainty. The unwarranted leap in Derrida’s theory of meaning thus undermines his neglect of modest epistemologies as alternatives to skeptical anti-​rationalism. Derrida was right to suggest that the absence of signifieds fixed independent of their context implies that there are no brute facts; nothing is present to consciousness as a thing in itself. He was also right, therefore, to reject Husserl’s phenomenology as a means to uncover apriori truths by examining objects present to consciousness as such. Where Derrida went awry was in suggesting that the absence of simple presences undermines all attempts to justify the reasonableness of knowledge. I have argued that the content of signifieds can be fixed by an appropriate theoretical context, people can construct shared facts, and objective knowledge can arise out of social practices. 3

Excursus on Realism

I have responded to the question of knowledge by suggesting that objectivity emerges from comparisons among webs of beliefs. Critics might worry that my alternative to skeptical anti-​rationalism remains vague. Postmodernists in particular might argue that I have given them no reason to associate objective knowledge as I conceive it with the truth about a world existing outside of language. They might remind me, quite rightly, that if concepts can refer only in theoretical contexts, people cannot have unmediated contact with the world as it is. They might add, mistakenly, that to accept the constitutive role of theories is to sign-​up to their most important point: there is no extra-​linguistic reality; there is no outside to the text. They might conclude, again mistakenly, that once I grant that there is no outside to the text, I have to suspend or reject any account of truth as a relationship of knowledge to the world as it is. To respond to this chain of reasoning, I have to step back from Derrida’s own writings and consider several varieties of anti-​realism.

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One variety of anti-​realism concerns the semantic meaning or truth conditions of propositions. Semantic realists argue that the truth-​conditions of propositions are verification transcendent. In this view, propositions are true or false by virtue of facts about the world independent of whether people recognize the facts and even whether people could come to recognize the facts. In contrast, semantic anti-​realists insist that the truth-​conditions of a proposition depend on what in principle would give people warrant to assert or reject that proposition. Postfoundationalists should adopt semantic anti-​realism irrespective of whether they hold a differential theory of meaning, as do the poststructuralists, or a relational theory of meaning, as do I. A rejection of pure experience implies that people can have only mediated contact with the world. People’s experiences can only be experiences of a world they make. Concepts and propositions can refer only to objects and states of affairs as they appear in the world as people interpret it, not as they are in a world independent of interpretations. Propositions cannot have truth-​conditions outside the webs of belief by which people construct their world, classify the objects in it, and define the criteria that have to be met to warrant assertion of any particular proposition. A relational theory of meaning suggests that the truth-​conditions of a proposition depend on the theories by which people give stability to the concepts in that proposition. The postmodernists crafted their accounts of meaning and truth in opposition to semantic realism. Derrida’s main concern was phenomenology’s entanglement with a myth of presence based on faith in “the ideal transparency and perfect univocity of language”.11 Foucault described his archaeological approach in contrast to the realism of A. O. Lovejoy, arguing that archaeology “does not try to repeat what has been said by reaching it in its very identity”; it “does not claim to efface itself in the ambiguous modesty of a reading that would bring back, in all its purity, the distant, precarious, almost effaced light of the origin”.12 However, although postmodernists directed their fire mainly at semantic realism, they implied that semantic anti-​realism entails ontological and epistemological anti-​realism. They thus concluded that there is no outside the text. For example, Derrida wrote that once he realized that “the centre could not be thought in the form of a being-​present” –​once he realized that the centre was “a sort of non-​locus in which an infinite number of sign-​substitutions came into play” –​he concluded that “in the absence of a centre or origin,

11 12

J. Derrida, “Meaning and Representation”, in Speech and Phenomena, p. 52. M. Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge (New York: Pantheon, 1972), pp. 139–​140.

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everything became discourse”.13 Elsewhere, he wrote, “presence disappearing in its own radiance, the hidden source of light, of truth, and of meaning, the erasure of the visage of Being –​such must be the insistent return of that which subjects metaphysics to metaphor”.14 It is this move from semantic anti-​realism to ontological and epistemological anti-​realism that postfoundationalists have to counter if they are to link objective knowledge, as I have analyzed it, to the truth about a world given independent of language. Can postfoundationalists combine their semantic anti-​realism with ontological and epistemological realism? Ontological realists believe in a world that exists as it is independent of people’s perceptions and concepts. They do not claim that there exist objects, properties, and relations corresponding to all concepts. Whether to ascribe existence to any particular entity, including quarks and phoenixes, is an empirical issue. Ontological realists assert only that the world contains some objects that have properties and act on one another independent of people’s perceptions. In contrast, ontological anti-​ realists argue that it is incoherent to think of existence in terms that do not refer to mind and language. Semantic anti-​realism might appear to lend support to ontological anti-​realism, for it implies that the objects that exist are just the objects to which a body of theories ascribes existence. It might appear that because we can have access only to our world, it is senseless to talk about the world as it is independent of us. Ontological anti-​realism tempts postmodernists because of their commitment to semantic anti-​realism. They argue that because the objects to which we refer depend on the particular theories that we hold, therefore these objects cannot exist outside our language and theories. However, this argument ignores an important distinction. Semantic anti-​realism implies that our theories are constitutive of the concepts we use to pick out objects, but it does not imply that our theories are also constitutive of the objects we pick out using our concepts. Again, to say that our theories fix the boundaries of a concept is not necessarily to say that our theories fix the boundaries of any given object to which we refer using that concept. Imagine that someone at the zoo says, “look at the cobra”. Even if our theories about species differentiation are constitutive of the concept “cobra”, that does not mean they are constitutive of the individual cobra at the zoo. Thus, semantic anti-​realism is compatible with ontological realism.

13 14

Derrida, “Structure, Sign, and Play”, p. 280. J. Derrida, “White Mythology”, p. 268.

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It is one thing to show that ontological realism is compatible with semantic anti-​realism and another to defend ontological realism. Postfoundationalists can defend ontological realism by arguing that our theories simultaneously stabilize our concepts and give us grounds for postulating a world independent of us. Our theories incorporate a pledge to ontological realism. Our world as constructed by our theories includes a belief in the world as its hidden source. We treat objects in our world as if they bore a relation to a world independent of our concepts. We treat the objects in our world as if they come from the contents of the world. Indeed, our theories lead us to believe that the world limits the concepts that people might hold or at least the ways in which they might interpret the world. People cannot adopt concepts that construct their experiences in ways that do not enable them to act satisfactorily in the world. For example, snake catchers in South India cannot treat cobras as harmless or they will be poisoned; they cannot conceive of venomous snakes and non-​ venomous snakes alike as objects they can pick up without precautions. Thus, although postfoundationalists cannot defend ontological realism by reference to direct experiences of the world, they can do so by reference to the concepts and theories that are constitutive of our world. In contrast to those postmodernists who reject the world as a thing to which our world does not offer us any means of access, they can argue that the world is present in our world. Postmodernists might suggest that semantic anti-​realism leaves no grounds on which to continue to adhere to the theories that bring the world into our world. They might argue that if the world is only a postulate of our world, we should remake our world to erase this postulate. However, this argument either ignores the extent to which our world gives us good reasons to believe in ontological realism or else it rests on too stringent a concept of justified knowledge. There are good reasons to accept ontological realism. For a start, I have already argued that our actions give us reasons for believing in ontological realism. In addition, I can reinforce this affirmation of the world by arguing that it is an inference to the best explanation of the evidence. The best explanation of our world is that there is a world independent of us of which we have experiences and in which we act. Postmodernists often seem less interested in opposing such arguments than in suggesting that these arguments are inadequate to secure ontological realism. They suggest that we cannot justify postulating the world because we do not have direct access to it. However, when postmodernists thus dismiss indirect arguments for ontological realism, they rely on too stringent a concept of justified knowledge. It would be odd, after all, to reject foundationalist appeals to pure experience only to invoke a strict concept of justified knowledge as needing unmediated access. But any less stringent

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concept of justified knowledge, such as my comparative one, opens the possibility that indirect access is enough to justify ontological realism. Although postfoundationalists can combine semantic anti-​realism with ontological realism, doing so raises epistemological questions. It creates a gap between our world and the world. It separates our understanding of things from things as they are. It divorces justified knowledge from truth. Postmodernists might argue that unless postfoundationalists can bridge this gap, ontological realism remains an empty assertion of the existence of the world. Can postfoundationalists defend epistemological realism, that is, the belief that objective knowledge is not only the best representation of our world but also a reasonable approximation to the world? Although epistemological realists accept that entrenched scientific theories might be wrong, they believe that the language of science is a reasonable account of objects, properties, and events in the world, not just a way of organizing experiences. People’s perceptions and cognitive processes are reliable, so scientific concepts –​such as atom and quantum fluctuation –​and scientific theories –​such as gravity and evolution –​provide a reasonable account of the world. In contrast, epistemological anti-​realists argue that there is no reason to assume that scientific concepts and theories provide a reliable account of the world. Postmodernists might suggest that semantic anti-​realism entails epistemological anti-​realism. They might argue that theories, traditions, discourses, and social relations adversely influence what people take to be true. Postmodernists might reject epistemological realism because prior theories and social relations block or mediate contact with the world as it is. However, this argument relies on a dubious premise. Mediated contact is not necessarily ineffective. On the contrary, intermediaries can improve contact with objects. Telescopes and microscopes improve visual contact with distant and small objects. Microphones and hearing-​aids improve audio contact. Telephones and email increase social contacts. Ontological anti-​realism rules out mediated contact with the world simply because it denies the reasonableness of any appeal to the world. Given ontological realism, however, there is no reason to believe that perceptual apparatuses, prior theories, and social relations necessarily block access to the world rather than improving it. Thus, semantic anti-​realism is compatible with epistemological realism as well as ontological realism. Whether postfoundationalists adopt epistemological realism should depend on arguments about the validity of the intermediaries by which people get knowledge. Here postfoundationalists can defend people’s perceptual and cognitive apparatuses in ways that echo their defense of ontological realism. First, people act on knowledge produced by these apparatuses, and actions are

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broadly effective, so there are grounds for believing in the broad accuracy of these apparatuses. For example, when people switch on a light, they rely on perception of the switch’s location and theories of electricity, so when the light comes on, there is reason to grant the broad accuracy of their perceptual and cognitive apparatuses. Second, the broad reliability of these apparatuses is an inference to the best explanation. The best explanation for the effectiveness of so many everyday actions is that people’s perceptual and cognitive apparatuses are generally reliable. Finally, deflated criteria of truth can show the adequacy of these arguments to defend the intermediaries by which people get knowledge. A postfoundational rejection of pure experience and pure reason precludes the demand that epistemological realists show their position is irrefutable. The defense of epistemological realism requires only good reasons to believe in the broad reliability of perceptual and cognitive apparatuses. Even if semantic anti-​realism prompts deflated epistemological claims, people still have to act, and when they act, they accept certain beliefs, including, on the best available account, the belief that human perceptual and cognitive apparatuses are broadly reliable. My postfoundational defense of ontological and epistemological realism applies to theoretical objects and properties as well as perceived ones. People are generally effective at tasks such as switching on lights or asking others to do so. Their actions generally rely on knowledge of theoretical objects, such as electric currents and intentional states, as well as observed ones, such as light switches and bodily movements. The best explanation of the broad effectiveness of action is thus that people’s theoretical and observational terms alike broadly track the world as it is. Besides, postfoundationalism challenges any sharp distinction between the observable and theoretical, suggesting that theories influence decisions about what is observable. Finally, postfoundationalism challenges the idea that the evidence for theoretical objects must consist of observations. Evidence can be any proposition people accept as true, whether that proposition is about theory-​laden observations or theories themselves. Although postmodernists imply that there is no outside the text at all, their substantive critiques focus on the human sciences. They might suggest, therefore, that ontological and epistemological anti-​realism apply only to social life. They might argue that although the broad reliability of perceptual and cognitive apparatuses covers the social world, concepts play a special role in social life and this role leads to an anti-​realist social ontology and social epistemology. In this view, the constitutive relationship of concepts to actions and practices implies that the social world has no basis in a mind-​independent world. However, this view does not allow properly for the place of the natural world

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in the social world, or for the varying ways in which people construct different parts of the social world. One problem with an anti-​realist social ontology is that our theories about the world give us good reason to adopt a common-​sense naturalism. Humans are animals with physical bodies. People –​with their bodies, minds, actions, practices, and language –​are part of the natural world. This common-​sense naturalism suggests that aspects of the social world are in a sense “out there” independent of us. The natural world provides the setting for social life. Social life consists partly of interactions with nature. For example, some organisms cause disease in humans, and societies seek to reduce disease through public-​ health policies. Because we can use theories to define diseases such as malaria positively, we can go some way toward defining ill-​health and public health in a similar fashion. Critics might argue that common-​sense naturalism does not undermine an anti-​realist social ontology. They might define social concepts to exclude all references to nature. For example, they might distinguish a concept of “health” that includes a basis in the natural world from one of “public health” defined solely by reference to social norms. These critics would be right that the social world is constructed in a way the natural one is not; although human activity effects nature, the existence of nature is not a result of such activity. Nonetheless, social constructivism does not entail an anti-​realist social ontology. Once people make something, it can exist and even exist independently of them. Analyses of social constructivism should distinguish the different ways people make social objects. To begin, a general social constructivism focuses on the way people make social objects through intentional activity. Actions are constituted in part by intentional meanings, although as I will discuss in the next chapter there are debates about the nature of intentionality. When shopkeepers price goods, they make the social world through acting on their beliefs about how to make a profit and their understandings of market economics and fair exchange. Other parts of the social world are unintended consequences of intentional activity. If a shopkeeper prices her goods higher than her competitors and if potential customers buy goods at the lower prices available elsewhere, she will go broke irrespective of whether anyone intended or even foresaw the outcome. However, to recognize that people construct social objects through actions and their consequences is not to challenge ontological and epistemological realism. Even when a social object is a product of human activity, individuals encounter it as a real object of which they can have knowledge. Theories allow people to define “price” positively as, for example, “the amount of money to be handed over to get a good or service”. Then, if

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an individual walks into a shop, the prices are made by humans, but they are what they are and she can know them. The broad reliability of her perceptual and cognitive apparatuses extends from the natural world to her knowledge of prices. Linguistic social constructivists argue not only that people make the social world by intentional activity, but also that people make the intentional meanings on which they act. In this view, social concepts are contingent products of particular traditions and practices, not natural or unavoidable ways of conceiving and classifying objects. Concepts such as “femininity” and “working-​class” are artificial inventions of particular traditions, cultures, and societies, not terms for transhistorical essences associated with natural kinds. Linguistic social constructivism has much to recommend it. Social concepts rarely refer to essential properties that are common to all the particulars to which the concept applies and that explain other facets of these particulars.15 It may be that no social concept refers to such essences, especially if we define all social concepts to refer to things other than bodies and their movements and reactions. However, linguistic social constructivism does not entail an anti-​realist social ontology or social epistemology. Anti-​ essentialism does not imply that social concepts cannot refer to an external reality that people can know. The key issue here is whether social concepts are pragmatic or unfounded. Linguistic social constructivism implies an anti-​essentialism according to which social concepts are determined by social factors and do not have objective boundaries. Typically this anti-​essentialism inspires a pragmatic account of social concepts. In this view, social concepts are vague. They are conventional ways of dividing continuums, rather than terms for discrete chunks of experience. They capture family resemblances. Although pragmatic concepts do not refer to the essences of natural kinds, they do refer to groups of objects, properties, and events, often groups with vague boundaries. Social concepts often have just such pragmatic content. People can classify and group social objects in various ways. How they divide the social world depends on their histories and their purposes.

15

It is worth mentioning that modern evolutionary theory implies an anti-​essentialist view of species including homo sapiens. Evolutionary theory suggests that mutation can lead to the disappearance of any given trait from a future member of any species. Evolutionary theory also suggests that species arise during prolonged processes of mutation and drift that lead to vague boundaries between them. Thus, we might consider aligning anti-​ essentialism with living organisms defined in contrast to matter, rather than with the social world in contrast to the natural world.

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The role of social factors in fixing pragmatic concepts does not imply that these concepts have no basis in the world. On the contrary, postfoundationalists can defend the accuracy of pragmatic concepts using the by now familiar argument that their content comes from broadly reliable perceptual and cognitive apparatuses. Further, postfoundationalists can justify adopting any particular pragmatic concept by arguing that it best serves their descriptive, explanatory, or normative purposes. They might adopt a concept of “new public management” because its content derives from family resemblances among the public sector reforms they are describing. They might defend ascribing particular content to “neoliberalism” because doing so best explains the overlaps among the reforms. And they might define “democratic accountability” to describe a legitimate public sector given a normative commitment to self-​rule. Some linguistic constructivists reject pragmatic justifications of concepts by arguing that people’s purposes always come from self-​interest and relations of power. But this argument fails given, as I have argued, that justified knowledge is possible. Unless constructivists adopt a pessimistic view of human nature –​and most of them are rightly skeptical of appeals to a fixed human nature –​they must allow that people could define pragmatic concepts in pursuit of justified knowledge. Thus, although pragmatic concepts are socially determined ways of dividing the world, they still can refer to groups characterized by congruities. Linguistic social constructivism challenges the validity of concepts, therefore, only if the concepts fail to capture even a group characterized by family resemblances. For example, somebody might argue that “new public management” is an unfounded concept at least if it refers to a global trend. They might argue that different states introduced different reforms with widely varying results, and they might suggest that the varying reforms resemble and draw on each state’s traditions of administration rather than a neoliberal blueprint. In such cases, a concept is unfounded in that there is no fact –​ neither an essence nor congruities –​that it accurately picks out. However, even these cases do not lead to ontological or epistemological anti-​realism. On the contrary, they are cases in which the relevant concept is false of reality. They occur when people’s knowledge of the world leads them to say that the relevant concept does not pick out either a natural kind or a group. Here too postfoundationalism, with its semantic anti-​realism, is compatible with ontological and epistemological realism about social as well as natural objects. Postfoundationalists have reasons to believe that objective knowledge tracks the world as it is.

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Conclusion

Postmodernists challenge modern analyses of reference and truth. Like most postfoundationalists, they argue that people cannot escape their particular perspectives to get unmediated access to the world. People cannot be sure that their knowledge is not only valid for them but also absolutely certain. Unfortunately, the extent of the postmodern challenge to modern analyses of knowledge remains unclear. Sometimes postmodernists appear to reject the idea of justified knowledge, and perhaps with it, the idea of an independent world. One purpose of this chapter has been to suggest that postfoundationalists need not reject these ideas. But perhaps the postmodernists never meant to reject these ideas. It seems foolish to suggest that they thought that their dismissal of a world outside the text implied that society could erase buildings, people, or poverty just by changing ways of thinking and writing. Perhaps the postmodernists meant only to the challenge the idea of truth as absolute certainty based on pure experiences or pure reason. If that was the full extent of their challenge to modern analyses of knowledge, they might have done more to specify the alternative analyses of justified knowledge that they adopted after rejecting absolute certainty. Another purpose of this chapter has thus been to analyze the resources left after God. I have explored how lived practice allows people to give stability to concepts, to justify knowledge, and to postulate an independent world. I echoed postmodernism in arguing that postfoundationalism involves a rejection of Truth as absolute certainty. My argument was an a priori one about the logical consequences of concepts. Postfoundationalism entails a relational theory of meaning, according to which propositions cannot refer in splendid isolation but only in the context of relevant theories. This relational theory of meaning then entails a semantic anti-​realism, according to which propositions cannot have truth-​conditions outside the set of concepts by which people construct their world. What people should take to be true depends on their wider webs of belief. After that, I departed from some postmodernists by arguing that these webs of belief enable people to define concepts positively by their referents. Having done so, I was able to deploy a primarily a posteriori argument to bring the world back. I reintroduced ontological and epistemological realism using a naturalistic argument about what people reasonably might believe given the experience of acting in the world. The best explanation of our world and our ability to make our way in it is that our perceptual and cognitive apparatuses provide us with broadly reliable accounts of a world independent of us.

chapter 6

On Subjectivity Some postmodernists challenge modern analyses of subjectivity as well as knowledge. In Modern thought, Man often appears as both an active subject who crafts representations of the world and an object of study who exists in specific contexts. Michel Foucault’s The Order of Things highlighted the seeming tension between the idea that people freely make representations and actions and the claim that representations and actions can be explained by sciences of life, labor, and language. This chapter responds to the dilemma of subjectivity. It offers an analysis of personhood, exploring the nature of agency, consciousness, and rationality. The next chapter will consider the implications of this analysis of subjectivity for the human sciences, asking: what social objects exist and what forms of explanation are right for them? The poststructuralists’ debt to structuralism appears prominently in their persistent dismissal of subjectivity. Many poststructuralists continued to explain utterances, meanings, and actions by reference to the logic of an episteme, myth, or language itself. They dismissed appeals to the intentionality and reasoning of individuals. Roland Barthes wrote of how theorists had recently discovered that “it is language which speaks not the author” so they can now “substitute language itself for the person who until then had been supposed to be its owner”.1 According to Foucault, the concepts of the subject and author are historical aberrations that are already on their deathbed. According to Jacques Derrida, these concepts presuppose a myth of presence; they appeal to intentionality to create the illusion that consciousness and texts consist of stable meanings. In the historical chapters of this book, I cast doubt on the poststructuralists’ response to the dilemma of subjectivity. I argued that the structuralist denial of agency arose as a methodological attempt to craft an objective science of language. The poststructuralists later clung to a displaced philosophical version of this hostility to agency even as they abandoned the ideal of any such science. My historical arguments highlight a distinction between, on the one hand, structuralist agendas in the human sciences and, on the other, deconstruction of the philosophical ideas of personhood and subjectivity. The next

1 R. Barthes, “Death of the Author”, in Image, Music, Text, trans. S. Heath (London: Fontana, 1977), p. 145.

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chapter on the human sciences will include an analysis of the role that structures play in explaining actions and the consequences of actions. This chapter focuses on the relationship of quasi-​structures to agency, intentionality, and reasoning. My analysis of subjectivity will begin with a defense of agency. Although individuals are necessarily influenced by their social inheritances, they still have a capacity for creative innovation that enables them to transform those inheritances. Next, I will defend an analysis of agency that appeals to intentionality. Accounts of actions depend on ascriptions of reasons, beliefs, and desires to the actors. Finally, I will analyze intentionality in terms of a norm of rationality. Ascribing beliefs to people presumes that their beliefs are consistent at any given time and as they change over time. 1

Reclaiming Agency

Structuralism inspires much of the postmodern hostility to the subject. The structuralists characteristically tried to banish agency from explanations in the human sciences. The point of Ferdinand de Saussure’s methodological gesture was to craft a science of linguistics that did not appeal to parole. The later structuralists also sought to approach the human sciences in ways that did not entail appeals to agency. One example is Louis Althusser’s attempt to assert the scientific nature of Marxism by presenting individuals as passive supports of social structures. Another is Foucault’s archaeologies, especially his account of how an episteme defines the thought of each era. Even when Foucault wrote a foreword to the English edition of The Order of Things opposing those who called him a structuralist and arguably moderating his claims, he still dismissed agency. He contemplated writing a history of science “without reference to the scientist himself”, that is, without writing “not merely of the concrete individual represented by a proper name, but of his work and the particular form of his thought”.2 “I should like to know”, Foucault continued, “whether the subjects responsible for scientific discourse are not determined in their situation, their function, their perceptive capacity, and their practical possibilities by conditions that dominate and even overwhelm them”.3 Let me try to answer him. Do quasi-​structures and social conditions

2 M. Foucault, The Order of Things (London: Tavistock Publishers, 1970), p. xiii. 3 Foucault, Order of Things, p. xiv.

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determine conduct? Alternatively, does an acceptable account of conduct need an idea of agency, including creativity, intentionality, and reason? My full answer to Foucault consists in a response to the dilemma of subjectivity. It involves a series of arguments showing that people are situated agents who can act innovatively in accord with intentions they adopt for reasons of their own. However, this series of arguments will take time to unfold. I will begin with a defense of a largely empty concept situated agency and only then go on to link situated agency to intentionality and local reasoning. To begin, in other words, I will focus solely on whether quasi-​structures determine conduct. Given his focus, I can temporarily define agency solely in contrast to determinism; people are agents if contexts alone cannot fully explain their conduct. The case for agency begins to appear in the difficulties of imagining accounts of conduct that refer solely to quasi-​structures and other contexts. Consider three ways of unpacking the seemingly innocuous claim that context affects consciousness and so conduct. First, contexts might influence conduct but not establish limits to the forms conduct takes. This relationship between context and conduct cannot support rejection of agency. If contexts only influence conduct, contexts cannot fully explain the content of actions and speech. Individuals and their agency remain crucial to accounts of conduct. Second, context might restrict conduct by creating identifiable limits to the forms conduct can take without fixing the form it takes within those limits. This relationship between context and conduct can support a partial downplaying of agency but not stronger claims about the death of the subject. If contexts restrict performances, they can explain why actions and speech remain in certain limits, but individual subjects and their agency would continue to explain the particular character of action and speech within those limits. Third, context might decide conduct. Every detail of an action or utterance might derive solely from the context. Only this relationship between context and conduct could support a rejection of agency and so claims about the death of the subject. If context decided every feature of conduct, it would provide a full account of actions and utterances, so agency would be irrelevant. But contexts do not determine conduct. On the contrary, people adopt different theories and perform different actions against the background of the same context. Thus, there must be an undecided aspect to any given context. There must be a space in which people can adopt either this belief or that belief and perform either this action or that action. Quasi-​structures cannot displace agency, context cannot determine conduct, and langue cannot fix parole. It is not enough for poststructuralists to argue that features of conduct are uniform in a given context or that there are commonalities among all those who use a particular discourse. These

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suggestions imply that other features of speech and action are not uniform; rather, they are, it seems, an undecided part of conduct. To accept that contexts do not decide all conduct is to raise the possibility that agency explains what remains undecided by context. Context can only limit or influence conduct, not determine it. Whether context limits or influences conduct depends on whether one focuses on what is attempted or what is successful. When I examine the human sciences in the next chapter, I will argue that contexts limit the actions that people can perform successfully. For now, however, I will stick to the analysis of subjectivity, examining whether context can limit an agent’s beliefs and so the actions she might attempt to perform. Contexts cannot limit beliefs because it would be impossible for us to identify such a limit. The easiest way to show the impossibility of our identifying such a limit is counterfactually. To identify such a limit, we would have to be able to specify a belief that the person involved could not come to hold. But if we could specify such a belief, we could describe it to the person involved. And if we could describe it to them, it is possible they could come to understand it; they could grasp what beliefs and ideas the limit precluded. Thus, the alleged limit would not be a limit at all. So, in answer to Foucault, I can conclude that subjects are neither determined nor properly limited by their context. This conclusion is a logical, philosophical one. Much confusion arises from failure to distinguish this logical claim from superficially similar empirical ones. It is logically inconceivable that contexts determine or limit people’s beliefs. However, although strictly speaking contexts do not impose limits on beliefs, contexts often influence agents so powerfully that for all practical purposes there are boundaries people are not going to cross. Social influences may effectively preclude someone adopting certain beliefs even though it is logically possible that she might adopt them. Too many poststructuralists mistake strong patterns of influence for logical limits. Structuralism exercises a bewitching effect that encourages this mistake. Structuralism leads people to misconstrue methodological gestures and sociological short-​hands for logical analyses. Reasonable and even trite sociological claims become indefensible philosophical ones. Consider the example of empty signifiers.4 Some poststructuralists think of the self as a void filled by subject positions produced by discourses. Their opposition to agency then leaves them few resources to explain change in the relevant subject positions 4 For an early discussion of empty signifiers see R. Barthes, “Myth Today”, in Mythologies, trans. A. Lavers (London: Jonathan Cape, 1972), pp. 109–​159. For an even earlier discussion of floating signifiers see C. Lévi-​Strauss, Introduction to the Work of Marcel Mauss (London: Routledge, 1987).

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and discourses. Empty signifiers allegedly enable them to explain such change. Poststructuralists define empty signifiers as words or signs that have lost all content and are thus able to articulate diverse elements across multiple discourses. Now, this idea of an empty signifier appears reasonable enough if it is sociological shorthand. Political struggles for change often involve contests over words that have diverse and even incompatible meanings. However, if the idea of an empty signifier is a philosophical one, it is foolish, especially from a postfoundational perspective. Readers might think that empty signifiers are literally empty; their conventional use has neither to include nor exclude any content.5 Yet many common examples of empty signifiers clearly are not literally empty. The conventional referents of “justice” do not include a chair. The signifier “war on terror” does not cover pen and paper. The signifier “law and order” conventionally excludes a civil war with multiple antagonists. Perhaps, therefore, readers might suppose that empty signifiers are only metaphorically empty. Perhaps empty signifiers have content, just not specific content. Although some poststructuralists reject this idea, empty signifiers may just be ambiguous, with various people using them to refer to different objects, events, or states of affairs.6 However, this metaphorical analysis of empty signifiers implies, given postfoundationalism, that all signifiers are empty. Postfoundationalists deny that any signifier has a one-​to-​one correspondence with an object, event, or state of affairs. They imply that all signifiers are ambiguous and contestable. Thus, if we unpack the idea of an empty signifier literally, no signifier is empty, but if we unpack it metaphorically, all signifiers are empty. In either case, the idea of an empty signifier does not pick out a particular type of signifier that acts as a source of change. Once postfoundationalists stop mistaking strong patterns of influence for logical limits, they can reclaim agency. Even if contexts influence the content of beliefs and actions, full accounts of beliefs and actions require appeals to agency. But, does context necessarily influence agency? Some philosophers have postulated an autonomous subjectivity entirely uninfluenced by context. If the subject could be autonomous, claims about the influence of contexts on subjectivity would be empirical sociological ones, not logical philosophical ones. Postfoundationalism provides philosophical grounds for rejecting the possibility of autonomy and insisting that context necessarily influences conduct. 5 “An empty signifier is, strictly speaking, a signifier without a signified”: E. Laclau, “Why do Empty Signifiers Matter to Politics?” in Emancipation(s) (London: Verso, 1996), p. 36. 6 For one assertion of the contrast between empty and ambiguous signifiers see Laclau, “Empty Signifiers Matter”, p. 36.

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Postfoundationalism overlaps with a meaning holism, according to which the content of a proposition P depends on the other propositions one holds true. Further, because the content of a belief depends on background beliefs, people cannot come to hold any particular belief outside a prior web of beliefs, a person who holds beliefs and acts on them does so only against the background of a web of beliefs that is initially made available to her by a context. Subjectivity cannot be autonomous because people cannot reach beliefs uninfluenced by context. Even as postfoundationalists reclaim agency, therefore, they should allow that agency is inherently situated. When postfoundationalists defend a capacity for agency, they should recognize that agency always occurs in contexts that influence it. Poststructuralists are right to say that postfoundationalism undermines the idea of autonomy. They just go astray when they also reject the idea of situated agency. A rejection of autonomy suffices to support many of the poststructuralists’ criticisms of other analyses of subjectivity. One of Foucault’s main targets was Jean-​Paul Sartre and his existentialist account of the integrity of the subject. Sartre seemed to portray the subject as autonomous.7 Sartre suggested that people have an unlimited freedom apparent in their ability to make spontaneous authentic choices for which there are no existing grounds. To deny this unlimited freedom is, he claimed, the archetypal act of bad faith. People accept their existential freedom by taking responsibility for their actions, but such responsibility often causes an anxiety that they flee by pretending their lives and choices are the result of social forces. For Sartre, the human condition is one of existential freedom in which the moment of choice is unencumbered by external influences and pressures. To undercut Sartre’s existentialism requires only rejection of autonomy, not rejection of agency. If contexts always influence beliefs and actions, individuals cannot be autonomous, so there cannot be a moment of existential freedom when individuals make choices unaffected by social pressures. Consider the formation of beliefs. The idea of existential freedom implies that beliefs can have specific content independent of background assumptions; people could not reach beliefs uninfluenced by social contexts unless they could know things independent of prior theories. Yet postfoundationalism implies that 7 Although I adopt Foucault’s accounts of Sartre, the liberation theorists, and Hegelianism, his accounts can be challenged. I am especially suspicious that the poststructuralists treat Sartre as a straw man. For a sympathetic reading of Sartre that suggests that, in my terms, he defended agency but not autonomy see C. Howells, Sartre: The Necessity of Freedom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).

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meanings are holistic, so people necessarily reach the beliefs they do against the background of theories they inherit from their contexts. Consider also the performance of actions. A decision to act counts as a choice only when made for conscious or unconscious reasons, and these reasons include beliefs, even if only beliefs about how to realize desires. Thus, if beliefs are necessarily influenced by contexts, so are actions. To identify external influences on oneself and one’s choices is not necessarily bad faith; it can be an attempt at intellectual honesty. Another of Foucault’s targets was the account of the subject associated with liberation theorists such as Herbert Marcuse and Wilhelm Reich. Liberation theorists argued that individuals have an inner nature that can be repressed or fulfilled. They then built histories of sexuality around a repressive hypothesis.8 Their historical narratives suggested that until the seventeenth century people engaged in sex openly and joyfully, but with the rise of the bourgeoisie, from the seventeenth century through to the dark days of nineteenth century Victorianism, sexuality was silenced, repressed, surrounded by guilt, and restricted to the end of reproduction. For many liberation theorists, sexual and political freedom alike depended on the overthrow of bourgeois society. Foucault opposed liberation theories of the self by suggesting that individuals have no ahistorical nature to be liberated. He did not reject the claim that society can produce sexual misery. What he opposed was implicit appeals to a natural sexuality that society prevents from flourishing. Because Foucault denied the existence of a natural sexuality, he focused on the positive mechanisms by which society produces sexual identities and practices including those that cause misery. A similar challenge to liberation theorists and their repressive hypothesis arises from rejecting autonomy while defending situated agency. A rejection of autonomy implies that people’s beliefs, actions, and identities, including their sexuality, are necessarily influenced by the relevant social context. Thus, it does not make sense to postulate any subjectivity or sexuality free from the influence of society. It does not make sense to think of the influence of society as a negative repression to be overcome. On the contrary, a rejection of autonomy suggests that the influence of society is inevitable and so better conceived as a productive source of particular subjectivities. Yet another of Foucault’s targets was the Hegelian idea of a universal rationality unfolding through history. G. W. F. Hegel grounded human nature

8 M. Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1. An Introduction, trans. R. Hurley (New York: Pantheon, 1978), pp. 15–​50.

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and the choices people make in an immanent account of objective rationality. For Hegel, although the individual is not straightforwardly autonomous since an ulterior principle of objective reason influences beliefs and actions, the individual nonetheless reflects a universal reason since a dialectical logic governs mind’s development through history. Hegel defined the particular subject by reference to an autonomous universal mind that is itself knowable through its appearance in particular subjects. The logical development of the subject embodies the unfolding of objective reason. The universal-​I or absolute spirit appears in the activity of the particular-​I or individual subject. Foucault opposed the Hegelian notion of spirit by appealing to Friedrich Nietzsche’s claim that “the forces operating in history are not controlled by destiny or regulative mechanisms, but respond to haphazard conflicts”.9 For Foucault as for Nietzsche, history is contingent. History lacks a universal subject that might sustain an objective concept of rationality and serve as an interpretative principle for understanding particular individuals. A rejection of autonomy lends support to Nietzsche and Foucault against Hegel. The idea of situated agency implies that context is a product of conduct, rather than a quasi-​structure defined by the relations among its units, but these contexts arise haphazardly from diverse acts of situated agency. There is no need to postulate an absolute spirit guiding conduct. No universal reason guides beliefs and actions to lead history to a given telos. On the contrary, because situated agency is inherently undetermined, it has no universal or logical grounds. Nothing –​neither absolute spirit nor anything else –​requires individuals to develop in a particular way. To postulate anything such as absolute spirit as the immanent basis for agency is to obscure the contingency of judgment. Postfoundationalism entails a change in Man, not his death. It undermines the concepts of autonomy, liberation, and universal reason that have often characterized modern analyses of subjectivity. But it does not undermine the idea of human agency. People might be situated agents rather than autonomous agents, but they are nonetheless agents. They can innovate, adopt novel beliefs, and perform novel actions against the background of contexts that influence them.

9 F. Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals, ii, 12. Cited in M. Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History”, in The Foucault Reader, ed. P. Rabinow (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), p. 88.

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Reclaiming Intentionality

The preceding arguments leave agency rather empty. To argue that contexts do not fix or properly limit agency is not to argue that individuals play an active role in deciding what they will believe and how they will act. Perhaps agency is random chance. Perhaps agency merely stands for unexplained variance much as error terms do in statistics. This largely empty idea of agency would not provide much of an alternative to poststructuralism. On the contrary, if agency stood for variance and chance in a quasi-​structure, language, or system, then far from reclaiming subjectivity, it would echo the poststructuralist critique of structuralism. Derrida in particular criticized structuralism for postulating a false closure and ignoring the instabilities, slippages, and play that he tied to meaning as différance. Clearly Derrida and other poststructuralists often allow for chance and variance. They just analyze chance and variance as inherent within language or other quasi-​structures, not as products of intentional subjectivity. A proper response to poststructuralism requires a defense not only of chance and variance but also the intentional quality of agency. Intentional agency consists of a capacity to act for reasons of one’s own. Intentional actions embody the beliefs and desires of the actors. Intentionality does not refer here, as it does colloquially, to a prior purpose to do something. Intentionality refers, as it often does in philosophy, to the capacity of consciousness to be about objects that thus exist in or for the mind. Intentional states can represent things. Beliefs, desires, and motives are intentional states because they can be about objects, properties, states of affairs, and events. Agency is intentional because it embodies intentional states. Most people believe that agency is intentional with actions embodying beliefs and desires. This belief is not just an unjustified prejudice. On the contrary, the belief in intentional states draws support from two related arguments. The first argument comes from phenomenological experience. People experience themselves as having the capacity to direct their actions and reflect on their beliefs and desires. They distinguish actions that embody conscious and unconscious beliefs and desires from involuntary movements. They experience a difference between moving their legs to stand up and the reflex movement of their leg when someone taps their knee with a hammer. The former is the experience of intentional agency. It is difficult to imagine how people would conduct ourselves if they did not have this phenomenological experience. The second argument for intentional agency comes from ordinary language. In their everyday lives, people make sense of people’s actions by interpreting them as intentional. They postulate the conscious and unconscious beliefs and

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desires that led others to act. It is again difficult to imagine how people would interact socially if they did not treat one another as intentional agents. Most social interactions rely on people ascribing intentional states to one another; think, for example, of persuasion, debate, instruction, and voting. Phenomenological experience and ordinary language entail a commitment to intentional agency. Reminiscences and biographies of poststructuralists suggest that they too lived as if they and other people were intentional agents. If they did indeed do so, we might wonder what their inability to live in accord with their expressed beliefs about subjectivity tells us about those beliefs. The arguments for intentional agency are compelling. Before deciding the issue, however, one should ask what arguments led the poststructuralists to reject phenomenological experience and ordinary language. Their main argument is that language is constitutive of the self. But claims about the linguistic construction of the self are fashionable, plausible, and yet hopelessly vague. There is a need for clearer analyses of the possible relationships of intentionality to language. Consider various ways of unpacking the vague claim that language is constitutive of the self. A first version of this claim treats language as a metaphor for consciousness, intentionality, and belief. Claim-​1 is thus that people’s actions embody their intentionality. This claim echoes our phenomenological experience and ordinary language. It does not help poststructuralists overturn the commitment to intentionality. A second version of the claim that language constitutes the self casts doubt on intentional agency by raising the possibility that intentionality, or at least its content, is a product of language. Claim-​2 is that people’s actions embody their beliefs and these beliefs arise against the background of a language, discourse, or tradition. As this claim treats language as equivalent to the quasi-​structures and other contexts that allegedly structure conduct, it is not surprising that it muddles agency with autonomy. Claim-​2 undermines autonomy, for it implies intentionality is necessarily influenced by the linguistic context; but, of course, to reject autonomy is not necessarily to reject intentional agency. There are, therefore, two different versions of claim-​2. Claim-​2a, which would undermine intentional agency, is: people’s actions embody beliefs, where these beliefs arise against the background of a social context or language that fixes or limits the beliefs that they might then go on to adopt. Although claim-​2a would support the poststructuralist hostility to the subject, it fails along with all appeals to a context that purportedly fixes or limits the beliefs people might adopt and so the actions they might try to perform. Claim-​2b, which allows for intentional agency, is: people’s actions embody their beliefs, where their beliefs reflect a social inheritance, but where they can change this inheritance

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for reasons of their own. Claim-​2b allows that a given inheritance might make it remarkably unlikely that an individual goes on to adopt some beliefs, but it also recognizes that there are no logical grounds for declaring it impossible for her to do so. Far from implying the death of Man, it replaces autonomy with situated agency. A final version of the claim that language constitutes the self focuses less on the influence of inherited contexts on people’s beliefs than on the idea that beliefs are themselves linguistic. Claim-​3 is that actions embody beliefs that are influenced by contexts, where beliefs and contexts alike are linguistic entities. The content of claim-​3 depends on how one thinks about linguistic entities. One possibility is that an intentional object is a linguistic entity if it consists of words. Claim-​3 is that intentional objects such as beliefs and desires exist only when expressed in language. Personally I think that claim-​3 is false. I believe that we ascribe beliefs and desires to people to make sense of their actions, and we sometimes postulate beliefs without implying people held them consciously using a particular linguistic expression. I would even suggest that one person might act in a way that ascribes beliefs to another without either of them having thought about the belief using any linguistic expression. For now, however, the important point is that irrespective of whether claim-​3 is true or false, it does not undermine the idea of intentional agency. People could be intentional agents even if intentional objects are necessarily embodied in words. Consider, for example, the conscious belief, “exercise improves one’s health”. Even if people can hold this belief only in a linguistic expression, they still might be agents who can act on it, reflect on it, and change it. Claim-​3 becomes relevant to the problem of subjectivity only if we conceive of linguistic entities in a way that precludes their being objects of intentionality. It becomes relevant only if we take it to supplant intentionality with linguistic entities that are not themselves intentional objects. However, if we took claim-​3 in this way, it would no longer be a claim about the relationship of language to the self. We would have turned our attention from the supposed linguistic construction of the self to the possibility of denying appeals to any self. Let me pause here briefly to distinguish between these two different ways of challenging intentional agency. On the one hand, critics might argue that language constitutes intentionality or the self. I have been considering different versions of that argument, and I have suggested they fail. On the other hand, critics might argue that there is no such thing as intentionality or the self. Although both of these arguments are associated with poststructuralism, they are incompatible. If language constitutes the self, there must be a self that is constituted by language. Alternatively, if there is no self, it is meaningless to say that the self is constituted by language.

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Poststructuralists challenge intentionality mainly by arguing that the self is linguistically constituted, but sometimes by denying the validity of any appeal to intentionality. The latter arguments are not about the role of language in giving us identities. Rather, they try to rule out appeals to intentionality as the source of meanings and so by implication actions. How do poststructuralists argue against appeals to intentional states? Perhaps I should begin by pointing out that the poststructuralist theory of meaning does not provide such an argument. It might seem that if signs (linguistic entities) gained meaning only from relations of difference within a system of signs, then analyses of meaning could not appeal to intentional states. However, even if the poststructuralist theory of meaning was correct –​and I have argued it is not –​it would not necessarily undermine intentional agency. The relevant system of signs could be the web of beliefs of an intentional agent, and if it were, signs would gain their meaning from the relations of difference among intentional objects. The arguments by which poststructuralists reject appeals to intentionality are those that imply interpreters cannot escape language. Poststructuralists often suggest that interpreters are trapped in an endless chain of signifiers that takes them from one sign to another without any possibility of bringing the chain to an end through appeals to non-​linguistic objects. For Derrida, a text is “a differential network, a fabric of traces referring endlessly to something other than itself, to other differential traces”.10 A weak reading of the argument that interpreters cannot escape language is compatible with intentionality. On this reading, the argument that interpreters cannot escape language reiterates the postfoundational rejection of pure experience and pure reason. All experiences are theory-​laden, including those of intentional states, even one’s own intentional states. When people interpret actions by ascribing particular intentional states to the actor, they do so in ways that reflect their own prior theories; they do not merely record an intentionality that is immediately present to them. All postfoundationalists will agree, therefore, that interpreters cannot get outside language to have direct experiences of intentional states. Yet postfoundationalists can deny the possibility of direct experiences of intentional states without dismissing intentionality. Poststructuralists challenge intentional agency only if they defend a strong reading of the argument that interpreters cannot escape language. This strong reading suggests that because interpreters do not have direct experience of intentionality, they cannot appeal to someone’s intentional states as

10

J. Derrida, “Living On: Borderlines”, in H. Bloom, P. de Man, J. Derrida, G. Hartman, and J. Hillis Miller, Deconstruction and Criticism (New York: Seabury Press, 1979), p. 84.

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constitutive of what texts and actions meant to her. In this view, interpreters are unable to make any link between actions or texts and the intentional states of the agent or author. It is at this point that poststructuralism parts company with a postfoundational historicism and humanism. Poststructuralists sometimes imply that because we cannot have direct access to intentional states, we cannot possibly appeal to intentional states to fix, clarify, or explain meanings. Derrida writes: All those boundaries that form the running border of what used to be called a text, of what we once thought this word could identify, i.e. the supposed end and beginning of a work, the unity of a corpus, the title, the margins, the signatures, the referential realm outside the frame, and so forth [have been subject to] a sort of overrun that spoils all these boundaries and divisions and forces us to extend the accredited concept, the dominant notion of a ‘text’.11 Derrida suggests here that any interpretation that pursues such an object to ground or give meaning to a text is a misconceived and perhaps unethical repression of the slippages, playfulness, and difference inherent in language. The strong version of the claim that interpreters cannot escape language raises the question: how might one justify appealing to intentional states while accepting a postfoundational epistemology? My answer begins by returning to the idea that postfoundationalists can defend philosophical commitments by reference to lived practice. Whenever people act, they commit themselves at least provisionally to the adequacy of various beliefs about the world. For example, if someone feels hungry, goes to a café, orders a sandwich, pays in cash, and eats, they commit themselves to beliefs about the existence of certain objects and about the nature of these objects. Philosophy can go to work on the beliefs that people commit themselves to by their actions. Philosophy can analyze the implications of these concepts to provide an account of the classes of objects found in the world and the forms of reasoning fitting those objects. For example, a commitment to bread suggests the world contains physical objects, a commitment to money suggests it contains objects that acquire significance through inter-​subjective beliefs, and a commitment to people who act for reasons of their own suggests it contains intentional states. Philosophical analysis of the concepts embedded in action provides good reason to believe in intentionality. 11

Derrida, “Living On: Borderlines”, p. 83.

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Some poststructuralists might counter that their main objection is not to postulating intentional states in general. Their objection is to attempts to postulate particular intentional states as constitutive of the meaning of particular texts and actions. They might admit that philosophical reflection on the concepts embedded in action provides good reasons for postulating the existence of objects belonging to certain general classes, but then insist that philosophical reflection cannot legitimate postulating particular instance of these classes. Perhaps philosophy supports the claim that people have intentional states, but not ascribing webs of belief to particular individuals. Surely, however, postfoundationalists can defend ascribing particular intentional states to agents on grounds of inference to the best explanation. Because there are good reasons to populate the world with intentional states such as beliefs, we can assume a particular agent held beliefs. And although we do not have direct access to these beliefs, we can justify ascribing particular beliefs to her by saying that doing so best explains the evidence. Philosophy provides grounds for assuming that Thomas Hobbes had beliefs he expressed in Leviathan. This assumption raises the question of what those beliefs were. Historians can answer this question by saying that ascribing certain beliefs to Hobbes best makes sense of the evidence. Inference to the best explanation thus provides a justification for postulating particular intentional states as those that explain particular actions. Poststructuralist arguments against postulating intentional states often combine incompatible ideas. They rely on postfoundational rejections of pure experience to deny that people have direct experience of intentionality; but they rely on a foundationalist identification of knowledge with direct experience to argue that interpreters cannot have knowledge of intentional states. Surely, however, this foundationalist identification of knowledge with direct experience is an awkward idea for postfoundationalists to defend. I have argued instead that postfoundationalism allows people to postulate objects of which they do not have direct experience. Even if people have access only to texts, they legitimately might postulate intentional states as external sources of those texts. My analysis of intentional states draws on the analyses of realism and truth in the previous chapter. If a critic asks about the ontological status of intentional states, I can draw on my analysis of realism to reply that we postulate them as having a real existence. The postfoundational claim that people have access only to our world, not the world as it is, applies to all objects not just intentional states. Yet our world gives us reasons –​reasons that are as good as they get once one rejects foundationalism –​to assume that intentional states, like cobras, are objects in the world. Similarly, if a critic asks about the

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epistemological status of intentional states, I can draw on my analysis of truth to reply that they are objective because they are part of the best story available to us. The postfoundational claim that people cannot justify truth-​claims by reference to some fixed reality applies across-​the-​board not only to intentional states. Yet we can justify claims about the world (including intentional states) by appealing to a comparison of the rival accounts available to us. Although people cannot have direct experience of intentional objects, they legitimately may postulate them to explain actions. Phenomenological experience and ordinary language are right to unpack subjectivity as a capacity for intentional agency. 3

Reclaiming Rationality

To argue that subjects are intentional agents is not to argue that the content of their intentionality is consistent and under their control. Thus the question remains: are intentional agents rational? Poststructuralists imply that subjectivity is inherently fractured and that individuals lack any center to exercise the control needed for self-​mastery. In contrast, I believe that we should ascribe conceptual priority to rational consistency, but that doing so neither precludes division nor entails self-​mastery. Many of us unreflectively assume that people hold minimally rational beliefs. We do not presume that their beliefs are objectively rational, only that they are broadly consistent. Poststructuralists argue against any such presumption of consistency in part because they downplay agency. Their appeals to quasi-​structures undermine concern with the consistency of people’s intentionality, for the consistency constraints that apply to a language are much weaker than those that apply to beliefs. Most of us would be puzzled by someone who believed a room is both square and round but we do not find it odd that a particular language contains the propositions “the room is square” and “the room is round”. One of the main ways in which the poststructuralists undermine the rationality of the subject is thus by promoting strong versions of the claim that language constructs the self. If langue did decide parole, there would be little reason to think of the self as rational. In contrast, a rejection of quasi-​structuralism reawakens a sense of puzzlement about someone who holds dramatically inconsistent beliefs. An analysis of the subject as an intentional agent reopens questions about rationality. Further, because language constitutes the self only in the sense that people’s actions embody their beliefs where their beliefs are influenced by a social inheritance but where they can change these inherited beliefs for

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reasons of their own –​a language may give people words, but people are situated agents who use words creatively to express themselves –​therefore questions about the rationality of the subject depend less on the nature of language than on the nature of beliefs and their ascription to people. Consider initially the extent to which the nature of beliefs suggests that they actually are rational. Beliefs must show a minimal degree of consistency because we postulate them to make sense of actions. People cannot act in incompatible ways at the same time, so the beliefs we ascribe to people at any moment in time must have a certain consistency. Because people act in the world, they must have a minimally consistent web of beliefs. Successfully to go to a shop and buy food, people have to believe that the shop exists, is open, and sells food, and that they have means of payment that the shop will accept. They cannot believe that the shop is open but does not exist or that it sells food but the shopkeeper will not accept any form of payment. This argument for the actual priority of consistent beliefs also applies over time. People’s actions relate to other actions they have done in the past and plan to do in the future. Many of their actions form chains held together by complex plans. To string together a series of actions in accord with a plan, people must have webs of belief that have some stability. Their beliefs must be stable enough to enable them to commit to future actions. To plan a skiing holiday, people have to believe that they are going somewhere where there is snow and where they will ski, and they have to do so while booking the hotel, buying tickets, and packing clothes and skis. They cannot believe that they need not take skis as there will be no snow, and they cannot change their mind about where they are going when they get to the airport. Clearly the actual priority of consistent beliefs does not take me far. It proves only that subjects are as consistent as they need to be to perform whatever set of actions they happen to perform. Postfoundationalists cannot identify the content of any minimal consistency entailed by people successfully performing actions and sets of actions. The particular web of beliefs and degree of consistency that we ascribe to people will depend on the particular actions each of them performs, and we cannot identify any set of actions that everybody must perform. Thus, the actual priority of consistency allows me to conclude only that each individual performs a set of actions A such that we can ascribe to her beliefs that cohere to a minimal extent C, where C depends on the nature of A. To extend the place of rationality in the analysis of subjectivity, let us turn to the process of ascribing beliefs to people. This process gives conceptual priority to consistency. Crucially, language is possible only because saying one thing typically rules out saying some other things. Sentences can have meaning only if to assert something is to deny the contrary. For example, if saying something

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was somewhere did not rule out saying it was not there, to say something was somewhere would have no meaning. (No doubt objects might have special properties allowing them to be and not be somewhere at the same time, but then to say something without these properties was somewhere would be to rule out saying it was not there). Language thus presupposes a norm of logical consistency governing its use in particular utterances. Further, this norm requires us initially to presume that the beliefs someone holds are consistent. We cannot treat people’s use of language as governed by a norm of consistency unless we postulate their beliefs in accord with a similar norm. For example, if someone says something is somewhere, we cannot rule out their saying it is not there unless we can presume that they do not believe it is both there and not there. We must use a general presumption that people’s beliefs are consistent because if we do not we will be unable to ascribe meanings to utterances. We can ascribe meanings to utterances and beliefs to people only if we do so in accord with a norm of consistency. The conceptual priority of consistent beliefs extends to changes in someone’s beliefs over time. To ascribe one belief to someone, we have to ascribe other beliefs to them, and we decide which other beliefs to ascribe to them in part by presuming that they do not change their beliefs at random. People’s beliefs typically remain stable unless they have reasons to change them. Beliefs differ here from desires and actions. We are not puzzled if someone wants to eat chocolate at one time, but not another time; nor are we puzzled if they act on these two desires, eating chocolate one evening but not the next. However, if someone believed that chocolate was fattening at one moment but not at the next, we would wonder what had led them to change their mind. When people hold a belief, we presume they will continue to do so unless new evidence or reasoning provides them with a reason to alter it. Our phenomenological experience reflects this presumption of consistency. It is difficult to imagine how we could avoid interpreting ourselves using a presumption of consistency. If we did not presume that our beliefs were consistent, we could not think of ourselves as having beliefs that give us reasons for action. Given that we thus take ourselves to have broadly consistent beliefs, we can reconcile our idea of ourselves with our treatment of others only by presuming that they too have broadly consistent beliefs. I have argued that subjectivity consists of intentionality, and that the process of interpreting intentionality consists of ascribing beliefs to actors in accord with a norm of rationality. However, the relevant concept of rationality applies only to consistency of belief, not objectively valid beliefs or utility-​maximizing actions. These latter concepts of rationality imply that people are autonomous subjects who adopt their beliefs and preferences apart from cultural contexts.

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In contrast, my concept of rationality as consistency refers to the distinctly local reasoning of situated agents. Reasoning is local in that it occurs within agents’ webs of belief. A web of beliefs is rational simply if it is consistent. Similarly, a change of beliefs is rational simply if it is an intelligible response from within a particular web of beliefs to a new idea or experience. Rationality does not depend on the interpreter’s assessment of the truth or reasonableness of the relevant beliefs or change of beliefs. The adjective “local” refers, in other words, to the way reasoning always takes place against the background of particular webs of belief. Just as agency is always situated rather than autonomous, so reasoning is always local, unable to escape its particular context to reach a view from nowhere. Reasoning is local in the same way as agency is situated; it necessarily takes place against an inherited background that influences it. Local reasoning differs significantly from the seemingly similar concept of local knowledge. Local knowledge refers to people’s specific, concrete, and practical grasp of their experiences and circumstances. The opposite of local knowledge is the general, abstract, and theoretical expertise gained from technical and professional training. Even the strongest advocate of local knowledge would allow that expertise is conceptually possible. In contrast, reasoning is local in its relationship to a web of beliefs. It stands in contrast to the objective rationality of an autonomous self. Indeed, insistence on the local nature of reasoning reflects a rejection of autonomy. Local reasoning thus describes both expert and local knowledge. Local reasoning can occur against the background of specialized and academic theories. The philosopher tracing the consequences of reason and the neoclassical economist grappling with a technical issue to refine a model are engaged in local reasoning against the background of a settled academic practice. Recognition of the local nature of reasoning divorces subjectivity from any implication of self-​mastery. Subjectivity is not an illusion, but neither is it something entirely under our control. Individuals are to a large extent what their contexts make them. Their reasoning and intentionality embody the lingering effects of social influences on their webs of belief. Again, as local ­reasoning is not autonomous, so its operation need not be conscious and reflective. Local reasoning often occurs tacitly, perhaps as an immediate response to an experience of a physical space or material object. A defense of local reasoning as consistency may appear to commit one if not to self-​mastery then to the unity of the subject. Yet, any remaining belief in the unity of the subject vanishes once we recall that consistency is a norm governing the ascription of beliefs with only a minimal and ill-​defined level of consistency being actually required. The conceptual priority of consistency

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does not mean that people cannot hold inconsistent beliefs, nor does it mean that interpeters cannot ascribe inconsistent beliefs to people. It means only that a norm of consistency governs the process of interpretation. Poststructuralists often appeal to psychoanalysis to argue that the self is divided. A presumption of consistency helps clarify the role and content of the unconscious. Most obviously, psychoanalytic concepts have a role only when accounts based on local reasoning prove inadequate. Interpreters should appeal to the unconscious only when the language of the conscious fails them, that is, when they postulate a conflict between someone’s actions and her self-​understanding. The content of psychoanalytic concepts also needs adjusting to allow for the priority of consistency. As Jacques Lacan famously tried to separate psychoanalytic concepts from physicalist themes in Sigmund Freud’s work, so postfoundationalists should separate them from the structuralist themes of Lacan’s work. Lacan argued that the unconscious was like a language, but his idea of a language remained ambiguous. On the one hand, Lacan sometimes used language simply to draw attention to psychological experiences of self, others, and objects. Language stands here as a synonym or expression of intentionality: people use language to express their conscious and unconscious beliefs and desires. Now, if we understand Lacan in this way, his appeal to language simply rejects positivism without asserting an alternative philosophical analysis of intentionality, so we could combine it with an analysis of intentionality that incorporates a presumption of consistency. On the other hand, however, Lacan sometimes implied that language is an abstract system governing its own performances and creating and dispersing the subject. He wrote, “Man speaks, then, but it is because the symbol has made him man”.12 Language stands here as a quasi-​structure that explains particular actions. Now, if we understand Lacan in this way, his appeal to language displaces explanations based on ascribing beliefs using a presumption of consistency, so it is incompatible with my analysis of subjectivity. Even after we grant that intentionality does not entail self-​mastery or unity, we still need to know how we should analyze the content of the conscious, subconscious, and unconscious bits of subjectivity. Poststructuralists such as Lacan are far too prone to appeal here to quasi-​structures. I have argued instead that peoples’ intentionality consists of the beliefs and desires that we ascribe to them in a process governed by a broad presumption of rationality. My

12

J. Lacan, “The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis”, in Écrits: A Selection, trans. A. Sheridan (London: Tavistock Publishing, 1977), p. 65.

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argument overlaps with humanist theories of psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis should concentrate on conscious and unconscious beliefs and desires, not the language in which they are expressed, and it should explain these beliefs and desires by reference to situated agency, not a determining structure. In clinical practice, for example, the analyst and patient develop and exchange stories about the patient’s past. They seek a better story that helps the patient because of its aesthetic unity, its pleasing and plausible nature, and the way it opens possibilities for new actions. The psychoanalytic encounter gives the patient new beliefs about her past thereby facilitating her to develop new patterns of activity. 4

Conclusion

Many poststructuralists associated their critiques of subjectivity with political opposition to humanism. I just spent a morning in the library looking at dictionary definitions of humanism. Almost all the definitions referred to an emphasis on the capacities, achievements, and worth of human life. They contrasted this emphasis on human life with religious and scholastic concerns with God and metaphysics. These definitions reflect standard accounts of Renaissance humanism. As I discussed in the chapter on modernity, Renaissance humanists believed that humans have an active faculty that enables them to influence their own fate within the order of things. Now I should add that Renaissance humanists based learning on empirical observations and the study of antiquity. They used the term humaniora (the humanities) to describe the scholarship of antiquity in explicit contrast to medieval scholasticism. The dictionary definitions of humanism also reflect its place in literary studies and the human sciences during the twentieth century. Humanism served then to capture not only the capacity and worth of this world and the individual, but also a resistance to scientism and formalism. Twentieth century humanists typically saw the humanities as a counter-​force to the rise of utilitarian rationalism, commerce, and technology. They rejected attempts to deny the meaningful nature of action and reduce human life to a rational calculus or science. Twentieth century humanists in literary studies often defined themselves in opposition to formalism, structuralism, and the avant-​garde. They rejected attempts to break the important connection between literature and life. Humanism has long referred to ways of thinking that emphasize humans and their capacity for agency. Further, although many humanists have been religious, a humanist emphasis on human life is often contrasted with religious

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and metaphysical speculations. Humanism focuses on everyday life. It draws attention to the capacities, achievements, and importance of humans and –​ one might hope –​other species. Poststructuralists depicted humanism in a way that differs from the dictionary definitions, accounts of Renaissance humanism, and the literary and social humanists of the twentieth century.13 The poststructuralists implied that humanists think of the individual as unconditioned, unified, and in complete control of herself. They often suggested, in addition, that this view of the individual is entangled with an imperialist western ethic. We might be tempted to dismiss this poststructuralist account of humanism as a caricature that does not merit serious discussion. In some ways, we would be right to do so. The poststructuralists offered a caricature of humanism that reflected their debt to the very formalist, structuralist, and avant garde ideas that the twentieth century humanists had denounced for failing to tie society and literature to activity and life. Nonetheless, we also might accept that the humanist emphases on secular reason, human affairs, and individual creativity can get entangled with themes that resemble those highlighted by poststructuralists. Thus, this chapter combined an analysis of the subject as a rational and intentional agent with considerations of the extent to which this analysis entails claims about the independence, self-​mastery, and unity of the subject. Many humanists identified subjectivity mainly with capacities for freedom, self-​direction, choice, and reason. The poststructuralists challenged humanism for allegedly relying on belief in autonomous freedom and pure reason. Unfortunately, these challenges depended on a shallow missreading of the history of humanism that failed to distinguish among some very different conceptual possibilities. In particular, the poststructuralists’ critique of autonomy slipped into denial of agency, and their critique of pure reason slipped into rejection of local reasoning. Individual autonomy and pure reason are difficult ideas for postfoundationalists to defend. Nonetheless, poststructuralists confront equal difficulties when they try to do without concepts such as situated agency and local reasoning. Ironically, Derrida himself entertained similar possibilities. In a relatively late interview with Jean-​Luc Nancy, he suggested that the humanist subject was a “fable” that stood in need of “de-​homogenizing”: “there never has been 13

The tendentious association of humanism with these other themes owed much to the debate between Heidegger and Sartre. See P. Gordon, “Hammer without a Master: French Phenomenology and the Origins of Deconstruction (Or, How Derrida Read Heidegger)”, in M. Bevir, J. Hargis, and S. Rushing, eds., Histories of Postmodernism (New York: Routledge, 2007), pp. 103–​30.

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The subject for anyone”.14 Given that the humanist subject is a fable, we might ask why even in that interview Derrida still appeared so anxious to define his position in opposition to it. We might also ask whether it was a fable created by the postmodernists themselves –​a fable that provided them with a straw man bearing little resemblance to the actual beliefs or texts of those with whom they associated it. If it was, then I am just the latest of a very, very long line of humanists who have believed more or less what Derrida then went on to introduce as if it were a novel possibility: Some might say: but what we call “subject” is not the absolute origin, pure will, identity to self, or presence to self of consciousness but precisely this non-​coincidence with self … I am thinking of those today who would try to reconstruct a discourse around a subject that would not be predeconstructive, around a subject that would no longer include the figure of mastery of self, of adequation to self, center and origin of the world, etc. … but would define the subject rather as the finite experience of non-​ identity to self, as the underivable inerpellation inasmuch as it comes from the other, from the trace of the other, with all the paradoxes or the aporia of being before the law.15 14 15

J. Derrida, “‘Eating Well’ or the Calculation of the Subject: An Interview with Jacques Derrida” in E. Cadava, P. Connor, and J-​L. Nancy, eds., Who Comes After the Subject? (New York: Routledge, 1991), p. 102. Derrida, “Eating Well”, pp. 103–​4.

chapter 7

On the Human Sciences Postmodern analyses of knowledge and subjectivity had their greatest impact in the human sciences. Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida inspired novel approaches to textual interpretation that proved especially popular among literary theorists. Michel Foucault crafted new vocabularies and agendas across disciplines such as anthropology, political science, and sociology. This chapter extends the arguments of the previous two chapters to the human sciences. It asks, what are the implications of postfoundational historicism and humanism for the study of texts, actions, and social practices? To answer this question, I will continue to think through the implications of rejecting the structuralist themes that linger in poststructuralism. The chapter on structuralism tracked these themes including a differential theory of meaning, doubt about agency, and preference for synchronic explanations. All these themes appear prominently in poststructuralist studies in the human sciences. Derrida’s deconstruction is a way of reading texts that focuses on synchronic quasi-​structural relations among signs, not the intentionality of particular agents. Foucault’s archaeologies are synchronic accounts of the consecutive epistemes that defined health, psychology, and the human sciences. I have already pointed to postfoundational historicism and humanism as an alternative to the structuralist themes lingering in poststructuralism. The chapter on knowledge argued that meanings draw on people’s webs of belief. Language is less a system of signs than meaning in action. People use language to do things. The chapter on subjectivity then defended situated agency and local reasoning. Explanations of action require a diachronic focus on how and why people reproduce, adjust, and transform the world they inherit. This chapter explores the implications of meaning in action, situated agency, and local reasoning for the human sciences. To begin, I argue that meanings exist only in intentional acts. Texts do not have intrinsic meanings. Texts have meaning only for people. This analysis of textual meaning replaces Derrida’s deconstruction with decentering. Where deconstruction is about revealing instabilities that allegedly inhere in language itself, decentering reveals the diversity and contingency of the meanings that different people attach to a given object. Next I turn to an analysis of social practices, echoing Foucault’s emphasis on mentalities while also pressing on the implications of my arguments for replacing appeals to epistemes and quasi-​structures with appeals to practices and discourses. Recognition of situated agency implies that human

© Mark Bevir, 2022 | DOI:10.1163/9789004513556_008

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scientists should explain actions, practices, and discourses using a pragmatic concept of tradition. Recognition of local reasoning implies that human scientists should explain change in traditions using a concept such as dilemma. Overall this chapter defends the approach to the human sciences that I introduced in the chapter on modernity in contrast to the archaeological approach Foucault used in The Order of Things. This chapter completes my philosophical defense of the approach taken in the historical part of the book. The final part of the book will examine the ethical implications of this philosophy. In particular, the next chapter on critique will suggest that postfoundational historicism and humanism resembles the genealogical approach that Foucault adopted as he moved away from the archaeological stance of The Order of Things. 1

Interpreting Texts

The human sciences explore texts broadly conceived. The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary defines a “text” as “the wording of anything written or printed”. Today many human scientists broaden the content of the term “text” to include paintings, architecture, actions, clothing, and anything else that carries meaning. Physical objects are texts if they are products of meaningful activity. Examples of texts can include the road network in a city, the financial transactions made by pre-​programmed computers, and the archaeological remains of an irrigation channel. The human sciences study objects that embody meanings. Meaning is an ambiguous term. Sometimes “meaning” refers to causal links in the natural world. All kinds of objects can have such natural meanings. For example, a cloud may mean rain, and steam may mean that water is boiling. In contrast, a non-​natural concept of meaning refers specifically to actions and texts. For example, a bell ringing may mean that class is over and the utterance “the door is shut” may mean that the door is shut. Non-​natural meanings arise only as products of consciousness and meaningful action. Non-​natural meanings occur, following my arguments in the previous chapter, only where there is intentionality. The physical objects studied by the natural sciences do not have non-​natural meanings. A bell ringing can mean that class is over only because it is part of a language broadly conceived. If the wind makes a bell ring outside earshot, the ringing of the bell might have a natural meaning but it could not have a non-​natural meaning. It might mean that the wind is blowing but it could not signify the end of class. The human sciences differ from natural science precisely in that they concern non-​natural meanings. An analysis

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of the human sciences needs an account of non-​natural meanings and their relation to texts. Poststructuralists typically draw here on the structural linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure. As I discussed in the chapter on knowledge, Derrida extended to signifieds Saussure’s claim about the arbitrary and differential nature of signifiers. He argued that meanings are inherently unstable and indeterminate: If totalization no longer has any meaning, it is not because the infiniteness of a field cannot be covered by a finite glance or a finite discourse, but because the nature of the field –​that is, language and a finite language –​excludes totalization. This field is in effect that of play, that is to say, a field of infinite substitutions only because it is finite, that is to say, because instead of being an inexhaustible field, as in the classical hypothesis, instead of being too large, there is something missing from it: a center which arrests and grounds the play of substitutions.1 Derrida’s quasi-​metaphysics of absence implies that texts necessarily are fluid and open. Texts do not have fixed meanings. All texts display a logic of difference; their meaning is never fully present but always differed through a relationship to what is absent. Other postmodernists echoed Derrida’s view. They too described texts as the sites of a play of signifiers in which meaning is perpetually deferred. Barthes argued that “the multiplicity of writing” meant that “everything is to be disentangled, nothing deciphered; the structure can be followed, ‘run’ (like the thread of a stocking) at every point and at every level, but there is nothing beneath: the space of writing is to be ranged over, not pierced; writing ceaselessly posits meaning ceaselessly to evaporate it, carrying out a systematic exemption of meaning”.2 Derrida introduced the word “deconstruction” to describe interpretations that revealed the logic of différance. Différance is a necessary feature of all texts. A deconstruction is a careful reading of how différance occurs in a particular text. To deconstruct a text is to expose the way it assumes fully present and stable meanings and the way it undermines and contradicts that assumption. Derrida said that he introduced deconstruction as a “strategic device” for detecting in texts “a devaluation of writing”, which they could sustain only “at 1 J. Derrida, “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences”, in Writing and Difference, trans A. Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), p. 289. 2 R. Barthes, “Death of the Author”, in Image, Music, Text, trans. S. Heath (London: Fontana, 1977), p. 147.

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the price of contradictions, of denials, of dogmatic decrees”.3 He developed careful readings of texts, focusing on their margins and aporias to show how they themselves undercut their apparent unity and sense. Deconstruction reads texts to reveal the appearance in them of the logic of différance that characterizes language as a quasi-​structure. The deconstruction of each text may be different, showing how each particular text works, but the logic of différance remains always the same, necessarily present in every text. For Derrida, therefore, deconstruction does not merely creatively impose contradictions and aporias on a text. Deconstruction highlights problems that are already there in a text. In the previous two chapters I rejected Derrida’s quasi-​structural view of language for an emphasis on webs of belief and intentionality. Postmodernists sometimes imply mistakenly that intentionalists identify the meaning of a text only with the purpose of its author. Clearly, however, an intentionalist alternative to quasi-​structural approaches to the human sciences should allow that texts have non-​natural meanings for their authors and for other people. Someone may ring a bell to warn of fire and yet other people may take the bell to mean the end of class. There is a distinction, therefore, between the meaning a text has for its author and the meaning it has for other people. Human scientists are as likely to study the later significance of a text as its authorial meaning. Sometimes they study the significance that a text has for a particular person. Sometimes they study the significance that a text has for a group of people, asking about its conventional social meaning. In both cases, the intentionality of the author might be of little importance. The distinction between the authorial meaning of a text and its significance maps on to one between two ways in which texts can acquire non-​natural meanings. On the one hand, some texts are products of human activity. They initially get a non-​natural meaning because the person or people who bring them into being mean something by them. Although these texts may later get a different significance, their initial meaning typically comes from the intentionality of their author. On the other hand, purely natural objects may get significance even though nobody produces them. They initially get a non-​natural meaning not because an author means something by them but because people attach a meaning to them. For example, even if the wind makes a bell ring, people might take the ringing bell to signal the end of class. Again, were erosion to create a scar shaped like a crucifix, people might take the crucifix to

3 J. Derrida, “The Time of a Thesis: Punctuations”, in A. Montefiore, ed., Philosophy in France Today (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), p. 40.

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have religious significance. Human scientists often study natural objects that become texts. Sociologists and anthropologists in particular examine the ways natural objects acquire significance and the social meanings they thus come to bear. Although intentional and purely natural objects can become texts, and although texts can have non-​natural meanings for their authors and others, all the resulting non-​natural meanings are intentional in that they are of or for consciousness. All non-​natural meanings are either meanings for individuals or abstractions derived from such meanings. Authorial meanings consist of the intentionality of the person or people who produce the relevant object. Non-​authorial meanings consist of the significance that a person or a group of people attach to the product of human or natural activity. This analysis of non-​natural meaning has clear implications for accounts of texts and textual interpretation. Crucially, to equate non-​natural meanings with intentionality is to adopt a principle of procedural individualism according to which texts only have meanings for specific people. Individual people associate meanings with utterances, books, films, and actions. Utterances, books, films, and actions do not have intrinsic meanings. It is a mistake to reify a text as if it had an inherent meaning or set of meanings. Consider, for example, John Locke’s Two Treatises of Government. Consider specifically a copy of the 1978 paperback Everyman’s Library edition of the Two Treatises with an introduction by W. S. Carpenter. This text is a physical object. It has a yellow dust jacket with a picture of Locke. It has 258 pages covered with black printed marks. Sometimes people postulate a text even though they cannot provide a clear account of its physical nature. There is no physical object that historians identify as Locke’s original manuscript copy of the Two Treatises. Instead they postulate this manuscript and seek knowledge of it through historical scholarship. As physical objects, texts do not have non-​natural meanings. There is a distinction, therefore, between texts defined in purely physical terms and works defined as the conjunction of a physical text and a non-​natural meaning. The distinction is between, on the one hand, the text as typed marks on pages or as sound waves coming from someone’s mouth, and on the other, the ideas that a particular person or group attaches to that text. Much confusion arises from the assumption that a text is a single work. Various people can attach different meanings to texts. A text may mean one thing to its author, assuming it has one, and come to have a different significance to other people. People might attach different meanings to a text, resulting in different works. Someone may think Locke’s manuscript is a defense of the Glorious Revolution. Someone else may think it is an exclusion tract calling for revolution.

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A text is a physical object that acts as a site at which one or more individual locates a work. This analysis of a text resolves problems about the nature of authorship that postmodernists often raise to support their approaches to texts. In particular, this analysis of a text points to a distinction between the creator and the author of a text. The creator of a text causes it to come into being. The author of a text is the person who first ascribes meaning to it. Although a text has both a creator and an author, the two need not be the same. The distinction between creator and author enables human scientists to postulate authors for problematic texts such as the Iliad or a “keep off the grass” sign. Consider texts with a composite author or multiple authors. In these cases, there is a distinction between the creators of the individual bits of the text and the author who first collected these bits together in a single text. Human scientists can distinguish the many people who played an active role in the oral tradition out of which the Iliad emerged from the author who first attached a meaning to the version of it that concerns them. Equally, if human scientists study just part of a text, they may turn their attention to an author other than the author of the whole. Similarly, although human scientists often ascribe the meaning of a co-​authored text to all the authors, they can focus on a part that they ascribe to just one of the co-​authors. Consider next simple, recurring, printed texts, including common public notices such as “keep off the grass”. Critics often challenge the odd idea that the author of these notices is someone who never sees or touches them. They reject the idea that the author is the person who first put up a sign saying “keep off the grass” or the person who programs a machine to produce a hundred such signs. However, the distinction between the creator and author of a text allows us to say simply that machines create these signs. Because machines cannot ascribe meanings to objects, the creator of these signs is not their author. But human scientists need not conclude that such notices do not have authors. They can say that the author of such a notice is the person who first ascribes meaning to it. They can even accept that the notice existed as an object for some time before its author made it a meaningful text. Often the creator and author of a text are the same. Sometimes, however, the creator does not ascribe any meaning to the text and so cannot be its author. The author of the text in these cases is the person who first ascribes meaning to it. This separation of author and creator will seem paradoxical only given a mistaken reduction of the meaning of a text to the conscious prior purposes of its author. Falsely to equate authorship and creation is to set up a rigid distinction between author and reader. In contrast, once human scientists recognize that a text is just a site at which various individuals locate diverse meanings, they can allow that authors and readers ascribe meanings to texts in similar

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ways. There is nothing paradoxical, therefore, in the idea that the author of an utterance might be not its creator but rather the first reader to ascribe meaning to it. Texts do not have innate meanings. Texts have meanings only for particular people –​authors and readers. This analysis of a text inspires a shift from deconstruction to decentering. Deconstruction allegedly exposes the openings and contradictions that necessarily infect texts due to the purely differential nature of meaning. In contrast, decentering explores the diversity of the works that particular people locate at the site of a text. Decentering echoes deconstruction in insisting that texts do not have single meanings. However, the openness of texts arises not from the purely differential nature of meaning but from the absence of meanings intrinsic to texts. Because meanings exist only for individuals, human scientists cannot identify a single meaning or even set of meanings that are immanent in or intrinsic to a text. A text has meaning only for people, and different people may understand a text differently. To define texts as sites for various works is to accept that texts can have multiple and conflicting meanings. An author first assigns meaning to a text, but the meaning of a text is not restricted to that which its author intended or even those which its author could have intended. The future meanings of a text arise instead from the ways it is read over time by different people in different places. Unlike deconstruction, decentering does not suggest that meanings are inherently unstable. Postfoundationalists can recognize the openness of texts without implying that texts are unstable. There is a distinction here between two types of indeterminacy. On the one hand, decentering recognizes that the future fate of a text remains unknown and so open. We cannot say what works individuals will attach to a text in the future. On the other hand, the open-​ended nature of a text’s fate does not imply that human scientists cannot identify the stable works that currently make up its content. The current content of a text consists of the works that individuals have attached to it as a site. Each of these works consists of the meaning that a particular person at a particular time tied to the text as a physical object. Each of these works has a stable and fixed content that does not depend on the future significance of the text. Human scientists can fix the current content of works because the meaning that a text had for someone in the past does not alter with later events. Historians can decide what the Two Treatises meant to Locke and what it has meant to other people in the past without knowing anything about its future fate. We cannot predict the future, so we cannot know how our heirs will react to texts. But we can discover what an author meant by a text, what another

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person has taken that text to mean, and what results a reading of that text has had to date. The open-​ended nature of a text’s future just does not make a text a peculiarly unstable object of study. Historians do not know who will be the next President but they can write about previous presidencies. Scientists might not know when a volcano will erupt in the future but they can study natural history to date its previous eruptions. An inability to predict the future does not preclude knowledge of the past or present. Once human scientists distinguish the future significance of a text from its current content, they no longer have any reason to deny that texts are stable objects. There is a stable reality: an author did mean something by a text and readers have understood the text to mean this and that. Human scientists’ knowledge of this reality is provisional in that future events might prompt them to revise their opinions. But the provisional nature of knowledge is not unique to textual interpretation. Rather, as I argued in the chapter on objectivity, all knowledge is provisional. The future might cast new light on all areas of knowledge. In no area of knowledge does the provisional nature of present-​day beliefs imply that the objects they postulate are unstable. Decentering does not seek to expose allegedly necessary instabilities in texts. It seeks, instead, to trace the historical works that have been located at the site of a text. To decenter is, therefore, to focus on the social construction of texts (including actions and practices) through the ability of individuals to create meanings. To decenter is to expose the disparate and conflicting meanings that various people associate with an object. It is to challenge the impression that the object has a given and agreed meaning. Decentering implies that many other approaches to textual interpretation use the illusion that texts have meanings to avoid engaging the historical complexity and diversity of the beliefs of social actors. It entails a shift of topic from the meaning of reified texts to the intentionality of specific people and groups of people. The decentering of texts might draw attention to the ways in which ideas and texts get authority. Human scientists might explore how elites develop and entrench certain canons and ideologies. For a start, decentering encourages human scientists to explore the shifting contexts in which people place various works at the site of a text. Received canons and dominant ideologies typically arise gradually as successive generations approach texts with changing interests, concerns, and criteria of excellence. Canons and ideologies are neither natural nor self-​evident. They are socially constructed authorities that remain open to contestation. In addition, decentering encourages human scientists to explore the synchronic and diachronic relations among works. Texts, traditions, and social practices consist in part of works that draw on, mimic, and

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contest one another. Canons and ideologies typically rest on oversimplifications of the relations among works. Finally, decentering encourages human scientists to explore how societies produce and distribute works and texts. Human scientists might study the publishing and retail practices, such as format and pricing, that influence who reads, what, how, and why. They might explore the ways in which social practices, including reviews, advertising, universities, churches, and political parties, promote or hide certain works from particular audiences. Canons and ideologies gain authority not only in reasoned debate but also in political struggles. 2

Social Ontology

The human sciences study works conceived as objects to which one or more people attach a meaning. Decentered theory states that these works consist only of the relevant physical objects and the meanings they have for particular people. It is a mistake to postulate any social object existing apart from the intentional activity of specific people. The question remains, however, does this humanist ontology cover all the objects studied by the human sciences? Human scientists often appeal to institutions, structures, networks, and discourses including, for example, Parliament, social classes, policy communities, and neoclassical economics. Can human scientists decenter all these objects? Does the social content of institutions and structures consist solely in the intentional activity of particular individuals? Foucault raised these questions when his focus shifted from quasi-​structural epistemes to practices and power. Foucault came to believe that “it is not just in the play of symbols that the subject is constituted”; the subject “is constituted in real practices –​historically analyzable practices”.4 When Foucault turned his attention from language to practices, he moved from an archaeological to a genealogical approach. He rejected attempts to understand social life not only as manifestations of psychological, functional, or institutional universals but also as manifestations of an underlying episteme or quasi-​structure. In this genealogical phase, Foucault suggested that there is no deep logic for the archaeologist to recover. Practices arise out of the largely random interactions and accumulations of various micro-​practices.

4 M. Foucault, “On the Genealogy of Ethics: An Overview of Work in Progress”, in H. Dreyfus and P. Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), p. 250.

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Unfortunately Foucault’s discussions of practices and power did not make it clear whether they consisted solely of the intentional activity of particular individuals. On the one hand, his increasing distance from structuralism seems to have inspired him to decenter social objects. He portrayed a world of contingent micro-​practices lacking structural properties and developmental logics. On the other, his lingering hostility to humanism seems to have led him to give to power, as he had epistemes, a productive existence apart from individual agency. He focused on the ways power forms individuals. He almost never evoked individual agency as the source of new regimes of power and new social practices. Sometimes he suggested that power and practices arise from power itself, not situated agency. He gestured at an analysis of practices and power as having content and causal efficacy apart from the intentional activity of specific individuals. The ambiguities in Foucault’s ontology raise two questions. The first is whether human scientists ascribe existence to individual subjects and their intentional states. I answered this question affirmatively through my analysis of subjectivity in the previous chapter. The second question is whether human scientists should adopt any ontological commitments other than those to people, their intentionality, and their actions. Many human scientists believe that institutions, languages, and structures have causal powers and arguably exist independently of individuals and their actions. Foucault sometimes appealed to the independent existence of quasi-​structures including epistemes, discourses, and regimes of power. Was he right to do so? It is important to clarify what is at stake here. The issue is not whether human scientists can describe patterns of belief and action as institutions, discourses, or regimes of power. Of course they can. If historians find economists in the late nineteenth century increasingly began to discuss a marginal utility theory of value, they can describe these discussions as a discourse. If sociologists observe a group of car workers who meet in a bar every Tuesday, they can describe these meetings as an informal institution. The interesting ontological question is not whether there are patterns to social life. It is whether human scientists can reduce statements about these patterns to ones about individuals and their intentional activity or whether they have to appeal to quasi-​structures. Do discourses consist of anything more than the utterances and beliefs of individuals? Do institutions consist of anything other than the overlapping beliefs and actions of specific people? A distinction between structures and practices pinpoints what is at stake here. Structures have properties, perhaps even causal properties, independent of those of particular people and their actions. In contrast, a practice is just a set of actions, albeit a set of actions that displays a pattern, perhaps even

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a pattern that remains stable across time. Practices often give us grounds for postulating beliefs, for we mainly ascribe beliefs to people to interpret their actions. Nonetheless, practices cannot explain actions because people act for reasons of their own. Although people sometimes act on their beliefs about a practice, when they do, human scientists should explain their action by reference to their beliefs about that practice and these beliefs need not be accurate. The existence of practices follows from the mere fact of regularities and exchanges in social life. But human scientists should not mistake these practices for structures. To mistake a practice for a structure is to suggest that the practice resembles a natural kind. Structures appear as natural kinds governed by a logic working more or less independently of particular individuals and their intentional activity. In the last two chapters, I have already suggested that postfoundationalism undermines this idea of a social structure. For a start, I have argued that postfoundationalism implies that social concepts and practices are not natural kinds with clear boundaries. Practices do not have an essence that is common to all similar cases and that explains other features of these cases. Practices have fuzzy boundaries. An observer can justify drawing the boundaries of a practice in one place rather than another only by a pragmatic reference to her purposes. When human scientists treat social objects as akin to natural kinds, they usually imply that the relevant objects are material rather than ideational. They argue that parts of the social world, most commonly the economy, exist apart from people’s ideas. In contrast, I have also argued that postfoundationalism suggests that the distinction between material and ideational features of social life is a false one. All experiences depend on prior theories. People’s beliefs, including those about their own interests, necessarily reflect their prior theories. The entire social world, including the economy, arises from people’s intentional activity. Even the consequences of actions are practices not structures. Consider cases in which the consequences of actions depend on the intentional activity of other people. For example, someone might turn their head and look about because someone shouted out to them. Such consequences consist of the other actions by which specific people respond to an earlier action. Human scientists clearly should explain the other actions by reference to the beliefs and desires of the relevant actors, not the earlier action itself, let alone a structure. Next consider cases in which the consequences are not other intentional actions. For example, if a thousand people try to drive their cars across the Golden Gate Bridge at 9am on a Monday morning, the result will be a traffic jam. Such unintended consequences are emergent properties of clusters of actions. They arise from the actions irrespective of whether individuals even

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thought of their possibility let alone believed and wanted them. Nonetheless, the unintended consequences arise solely because of the actions and various physical facts. Traffic jams on the Golden Gate arise because of the physical size of the bridge and the intentional actions of drivers trying to cross it. A humanist social ontology thus includes only individuals, their actions, and the practices to which their actions give rise. How does this ontology affect the most innovative aspect of Foucault’s shift from quasi-​structures to practices –​his account of power? Foucault developed a microphysical theory of power. He argued that regimes of power were sedimentations of specific techniques, strategies, and objectives that had developed in local settings. Regimes of power emerge from specific practices, such as overseeing prisoners in jails, separating patients in hospitals, and providing social security. Foucault wrote: Power must be analysed as something which circulates, or rather as something which only functions in the form of a chain. It is never located here or there, never in anybody’s hands, never appropriated as a commodity or piece of wealth. Power is employed and exercised through a net-​like organization. And not only do individuals circulate between its threads; they are always in the position of simultaneously undergoing and exercising power.5 The state is neither the source nor embodiment of power. Instead the state relies on a conglomeration of technologies of power that come into being in diverse micropractices. For Foucault, moreover, these micropractices are both material and ideational; they are patterns of behavior infused with meaning. Theoretical schemes get elaborated in a “whole series of diverse practices and strategies … they crystallise into institutions, they inform individual behaviour, they act as grids for the perception and evaluation of things”.6 Much of Foucault’s account of power fits well with my humanist social ontology. In particular, if human scientists decenter power, they will recognize that it is not a quasi-​structural fact with a clear locus in either state or society. Power does not have a central source in fixed social relations based on the defined interests of social classes or other groups. People interpretively construct their interests and so the social relations they form. People can identify their interests, perform actions, and forge social practices only against the 5 M. Foucault, “Two Lectures”, in Power/​Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–​1977, ed. C. Gordon (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1980), p. 98. 6 M. Foucault, “Questions of Method: An Interview with Michel Foucault”, trans. C. Gordon, Ideology and Consciousness 8 (1981), 6–​7.

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background of particular prior theories. Thus, power must refer to patterns of social relationships that embody contingent webs of belief. A decentered theory of power also echoes Foucault’s association of power with its effects on people. Power can refer to the way specific contexts help produce individual subjects with their beliefs and actions. Productive power refers to the situated nature of agency and especially the constitutive role that contexts play in giving people their initial webs of belief. In addition, a decentered theory of power can even keep the historical association of power with restraints on people. Power can refer to the restrictions that the actions of others place on what an individual can succeed in doing. Restrictive power works across intricate webs. All social actors find their possibilities for action restricted by what others do. Elected politicians, senior civil servants, doctors, police officers, and everyday citizens can all thwart one another’s actions and policies. Power does not have a centre that structures social relations. It emerges from diverse micropractices. Further, these practices also lack a centre that structures them. They emerge from the contingent but nonetheless intentional activity of individuals. When human scientists drift away from a humanist ontology –​when they mistake practices for structures or when they give power a central source –​ they drift towards determinism, reification, and foundationalism. Consider, for example, the widespread claim that institutions are “sticky”, possessing an inertial tendency. This claim gets dangerously close to determinism. It implies that causal mechanisms fix an institution’s development, albeit by fixing the agency of the relevant people. (After all, if agency was not thus fixed, the stickiness would appear only when people happened to act in a certain way, so “stickiness” would be a descriptive term applying to those cases but lacking explanatory power.) Further, when human scientists try to make sense of claims about institutional stickiness, they get dangerously close to reification or foundationalism. On the one hand, when they imply that the causal mechanism works independently of intentionality, they slide into reification. On the other, when they think of the mechanism as a feedback process that works through intentionality, they imply that people necessarily hold correct and rational beliefs about the nature of the institution and the costs of change. The structuralist themes lingering in poststructuralism create a similar drift towards reification and determinism if not foundationalism. A differential theory of meaning, hostility to human agency, and preference for synchronic explanations tempt poststructuralists to mistake practices for structures. Linguistic formalism encourages people to reify language and discourses. Poststructuralists sometimes reduce the content of speech-​acts to the unstable relations among signs. They forget that it is people who create

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meanings and practices. They treat meanings as existing within systems of signs apart from the actors who make them. In addition, hostility to agency and preference for synchronic explanations can lead to determinism. Systems of signs can appear not only to exist apart from the actors who make them but also to define what these actors can say and how they can say it. Some poststructuralists reject structuralism as deterministic while implying that as poststructuralists they view change, chance, and transformation as products of instabilities inherent in structures. But this poststructuralist argument elides the important ­question: are these instabilities necessary qualities of a disembodied quasi-​structure that defines its own development or are they products of people’s contingent activity? Properly to avoid determinism, reification, and foundationalism, human scientists need a humanist social ontology. They must decenter structures to show that they consist solely of particular people, their intentionality, and their actions. Perhaps appeals to institutions, structures, and quasi-​structures are just shorthand for appeals to intentional activity. However, the worry remains that human scientists become bewitched by this shorthand. They forget that their shorthand needs decentering through appeals to contingent beliefs and actions. 3

Social Explanation

Human scientists generally treat practices as structures because they want to explain social phenomena. When they use concepts such as institution, structure, and discourse purely descriptively, it is usually possible to treat the concepts as referring to patterns of intentionality and action. In contrast, when they use these concepts to explain actions and outcomes, they reify and fix the relevant structure. The structure appears as a cause that either operates independent of the actors’ beliefs or stands in for these beliefs. The aspiration to explain then lures human scientists on to the rocks of reification and determinism. Clearly, therefore, I should ask: what forms of social explanation suit a humanist ontology with its emphasis on decentering? Poststructuralists are unclear about the forms of explanation proper to social life. They have a clear preference for synchronic analyses that locate signs and actions in quasi-​structures but they are less clear about whether the quasi-​structures explain the content of the signs and actions. Their evasiveness again has roots in their lingering debt to structuralism. Although they inherit the structuralists’ preference for structuralist explanations, their rejection of scientism and their belief in the instability of structures mitigates against all

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formal explanations. Similarly, although their emphasis on contingency and instability could encourage diachronic explanations of intentional activity, their continuing hostility to agency mitigates against humanist explanations. Foucault’s later discussions of discourse and power illustrate this ambiguity about the nature of social explanation. On the one hand, he and his followers focus on singular practices instead of appealing to deep and hidden social forces that structure practices. But, on the other, they often assimilate these singular practices to monolithic concepts such as discipline or individualizing power. Again, on the one hand, their emphasis on contingency and particularity challenges formal and general analyses. But, on the other, they sometimes offer formal and general analyses of discourses and regimes of power. Alternatively, they portray discourses and regimes of power as contingent only to portray individuals and their conduct not as contingent but as manifestations of discourses and power. No wonder critics complain of a contradiction between the poststructuralists’ overt hostility to meta-​narratives and their reliance on an under theorized meta-​narrative. Yet the critics exaggerate, for the contradiction arises only if the poststructuralists want aggregate concepts such as discourse and power to explain anything. There is no contradiction if poststructuralists use their aggregate concepts merely to describe a pattern in social life. Poststructuralists, like everyone else, may use whatever aggregate concepts they believe best describe the world. If they believe that people are increasingly dealing with risk through personalized health plans and private pensions, they might point to an individualizing power. If they believe that certain individuals express similar ideas about freedom, markets, the importance of the consumer, and the need to roll back the state, they might point to a New Right discourse. These aggregate concepts merely describe broad patterns in the world. Their worth depends on whether one thinks the relevant patterns exist. Poststructuralists face no special problem in using aggregate concepts to describe the world, although they may choose to pay particular attention to exceptions that do not fit under their aggregate descriptions. Poststructuralists could argue that their aggregate concepts are merely descriptive, but then the obvious question arises: what forms of explanation do they think suitable for social life? It is when they avoid this question, or when they imply that their aggregate concepts do explanatory work, that they face problems. It is then that they deploy formal explanations in which discourse and power are quasi-​structures composed of units whose relations to one another explains the content of the discourse, regime of power, and so individuals’ actions. Foucault himself implied that discourse and power in a sense explained their effects irrespective of individual agency. He defined a

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discourse by “historical rules, always specific to time and place, and which, for a given period and within a social, economic, geographic, or linguistic zone, define the framework within which the enunciative functions are exercised”.7 Also, when discussing power, he explained, “what I want to show is how power relations can materially penetrate the body in depth, without depending even on the mediation of the subject’s own representations”.8 To reject the structuralist themes lingering in poststructuralism is to press home a rejection of formal explanations for humanist ones. Formal explanations evoke necessity. They apply to similar cases across time and space irrespective of the particular substance of each case. Some formal explanations are tautologies that work by definition but these are not my concern here. My interest lies in formal explanations that work explicitly or implicitly by suggesting the antecedents in the various cases share a certain property that makes the outcome necessary at least in a defined percentage of similar cases. These formal explanations abound in the human sciences. Rational choice theorists explain outcomes by reference to models based on formal assumptions about rationality. Behavioralists explain outcomes by formally correlating them with, for instance, social facts about the relevant individuals. Systems theorists typically try to explain outcomes by reference to formal functions that any system must fulfill. Institutionalists typically appeal to formal mechanisms and classifications to explain outcomes. Structuralists explain outcomes by the formal relations between the units in a system. Postfoundational humanism implies that there is something profoundly mistaken about importing these formal explanations into the human sciences.9 Humanism implies that practices are products of actions, where satisfactory explanations of actions must refer to the intentionality of the actors. Postfoundationalism implies that intentional or rational explanations must be contextual and historicist. To offer formal explanations of actions and practices is akin to giving a grammar textbook to someone who wants to understand Shakespeare’s sonnets. Just as the grammar textbook would provide little insight into how Shakespeare used language to express ideas and emotions, so formal explanations largely ignore the specific beliefs and desires on which people act in particular historical contexts.

7 M. Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A. Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon Books, 1972), pp. 153–​4. 8 M. Foucault, “The History of Sexuality”, in Power/​Knowledge, p. 186. 9 For a more detailed discussion of the material in the rest of this section see M. Bevir, The Logic of the History of Ideas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).

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So, as I argued in the previous chapter, postfoundational humanism analyzes subjectivity using the language of folk psychology. Human scientists should explain actions by reference to the actors’ intentionality, that is, the actors’ reasons for doing what they do. Again, because human scientists cannot reduce propositions about beliefs and desires to propositions about physiological facts, they must adopt the kind of rational explanation associated with folk psychology. Even formal explanations sometimes evoke folk psychology. Rational choice theorists typically explain actions by showing them to be rational expressions of particular beliefs and desires. Other human scientists might argue, similarly, that their appeals to formal categories are shorthand for appeals to beliefs and desires. A claim such as “workers generally vote for social democratic parties” might be shorthand for a set of claims about the beliefs, desires, and so voting habits of workers. Nonetheless, when formal explanations use the language of folk psychology, they still fail to allow for postfoundationalism. Postfoundationalism entails meaning holism and so an insistence on both the contextual and historical nature of rational explanations. Rational explanations are contextual because they make sense of any given belief by locating it in a web of beliefs. Rational explanations are historical because they make sense of webs of belief by locating them against the background of traditions that people modify in response to dilemmas. Postfoundationalism requires human scientists to adopt contextual explanations. Meaning holism implies that the content and reasonableness of a belief depends on its place in a wider web of beliefs. Thus, human scientists can explain why someone holds a belief by locating it in that person’s web of beliefs. Holism implies that we explain beliefs by showing how they relate to one another, not by reducing them to, or correlating them with, reified categories such as social class and institutional position. Human scientists explain beliefs –​and so actions and practices –​by pointing to the conceptual connections in a web of beliefs. Indeed, human scientists necessarily ascribe beliefs to people in a holistic process of interpretation. The content of a particular belief always depends on the other unexpressed and preconscious beliefs of the person concerned. Thus, to make sense of a particular utterance, action, or practice, human scientists have to ascribe webs of belief to the relevant actors. Human scientists cannot specify the content of a belief without explicitly or implicitly ascribing other beliefs to the relevant agent. Interpretation always involves ascribing whole webs of belief to actors, including beliefs that are consciously formulated in texts, beliefs that are consciously held but not expressed in texts, and beliefs that are preconscious and at times unconscious. Only by ascribing a web of beliefs to an agent can human scientists make sense of texts, actions, and practices. Further, as I argued in the last chapter, when human

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scientists ascribe beliefs to people, they necessarily rely on a presumption of coherence. Human scientists ascribe beliefs to people partly by showing how those beliefs cohere. They reveal the conceptual links that bind beliefs in a web. They reconstruct beliefs as a web held together by intelligible connections. Human scientists often want not only to explain a belief by locating it in a web of beliefs but also to explain that web of beliefs. Postfoundationalism implies that human scientists should explain webs of belief using historicist explanations. In the previous chapter, I argued that meaning holism implies that individuals are not autonomous because context necessarily influences conduct. People can grasp experiences and adopt new beliefs only against the background of an inherited web of beliefs. People necessarily get a first web of beliefs from the social context in which they come into being. Thus, human scientists cannot explain why someone holds a particular web of beliefs solely by reference to her experiences, interests, or social location. They have to refer to the tradition that formed the historical background against which she got her first web of beliefs. A tradition is the ideational background against which individuals come to adopt an initial web of beliefs. It influences (without determining or –​in a strict philosophical sense –​limiting) the beliefs that they go on to adopt. The philosophical justification for this definition of tradition comes from my analysis of situated agency. Traditions help explain why people hold the beliefs they do, and because beliefs are constitutive of actions, traditions also help explain actions. Nonetheless, traditions cannot fully explain actions partly because people act on desires as well as beliefs and partly because people are agents who can innovate against the background of tradition. It is important to distinguish here between ontology and explanation. My humanist social ontology consists only of agents, their intentionality, their actions, and the practices to which their actions give rise. However, this ontology does not mean that agency has to do all the explanatory work in the human sciences. On the contrary, a rejection of autonomy implies that human scientists can explain actions only by appealing to the traditions that influenced the actors. My humanist ontology is relevant here mainly for my analysis of tradition. For a start, my ontology implies that traditions consist only of agents, their intentionality, and their actions. Traditions contain beliefs and actions linked by temporal connections. The temporal connections enable human scientists to say that the tradition passed from generation to generation. Although human scientists can thus trace the continuity of a tradition over time, this continuity need not mean that any substantive theme remains present over time. The changes introduced by successive generations might result in the beginning and end points having no substantive themes in common. In addition, my ontology implies that traditions do not have an essence or fixed core

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with only their penumbra varying. Traditions are not natural kinds nor even discrete chunks of social life that have clear boundaries. While tradition is an ineluctable fact of human life, particular traditions are pragmatic concepts. Thus, human scientists should not appeal to traditions as ideal types by which to classify people, texts, or actions. Instead they should define traditions variously according to what they want to explain. They themselves individuate particular traditions, carving them out of the broad flow of history to explain particular social objects and events. My analysis of traditions precludes their determining their own development. How they evolve depends on the situated agency of individuals. When human scientists want to explain why someone revised previously held beliefs or changed a tradition, they should do so by appealing to dilemmas. A dilemma is any experience or idea that conflicts with someone’s beliefs and so forces her to alter the beliefs she inherited as a tradition. Recognition of situated agency implies that change originates in the responses and decisions of individuals. Whenever people adopt a new belief, they have to adjust their existing beliefs and practices to make way for the newcomer. To accept any new belief is to pose a dilemma that asks questions of an inherited tradition. Traditions change as individuals make a series of variations to them in response to any number of specific dilemmas. Like all meanings, dilemmas are always subjective or intersubjective. People change their beliefs and actions in response to any new idea they come to hold as true irrespective of whether that idea is true. Thus, in explaining change, human scientists cannot rely on their own accounts of the world. They need to appeal instead to the subjective beliefs of the people they study. Again, although dilemmas may arise from experiences of the world, human scientists cannot equate them with the world as it is. A dilemma differs significantly, therefore, from the pressures that positivists sometimes use to explain change. Positivists characteristically equate pressures with objective facts about the world rather than the subjective beliefs of social actors. Because they define pressures as real facts rather than subjective understandings, they clearly need an analysis of how these pressures lead people to change their actions. Presumably they need to argue either that people inevitably have a correct understanding of a pressure or that a pressure leads to new beliefs and actions even if actors have no subjective awareness of it. Either argument seems a hard one to make. A related point is that dilemmas do not have given solutions. People’s responses to dilemmas are undetermined. When people adopt new beliefs they necessarily change traditions through their creative agency. Even if it looks as if traditions tell people how to act and how to respond to dilemmas, traditions are at most guides to what they do. Even when people think they

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are merely applying a tradition, they are adjusting and changing it. However, although dilemmas do not have necessary solutions, human scientists can still begin to explain actors’ responses to dilemmas by reference to the character of both the dilemma and the actors’ existing beliefs. To adopt a new belief, people must adjust their existing beliefs to make room for it, and the new belief itself encourages some adjustments and discourages others. Further, people have to hook the new belief on to their existing beliefs, and their existing beliefs encourage some hooks and discourage others. People can integrate a new belief into their existing beliefs only by relating themes in it to themes already present in their beliefs. Change involves pushing and pulling a dilemma and tradition to bring them together. Concepts such as web of beliefs, tradition, and dilemma sustain contextualizing and historicist forms of social explanation. They avoid the reification and determinism associated with formal explanations, including those explanations that rely on quasi-​structural ideas of language, discourse, or power. To reject quasi-​structural explanations based on the concepts of discourse and power is not necessarily to reject these concepts; it is only to imply that these poststructuralist concepts are aggregate and descriptive, not explanatory. Nonetheless, the eschewal of reification and determinism shifts poststructuralist approaches in a more humanist and historicist direction. Meanings, discourses, and regimes of power are products of situated agency, not manifestations of quasi-​structures. Human scientists explain meanings and discourses by reference to the ways particular subjects grappled with dilemmas against the background of inherited traditions. Human scientists tell historical narratives that concentrate as much on the ways individuals produce traditions and practices as they do on the ways traditions and practices influence the later activity of individuals. Foucault himself foreshadowed a more humanist and historicist stance. His late work on power, subjectivity, and ethics even assumes situated agency. He argued that “power is exercised only over free subjects”, that is to say, “subjects who are faced with a field of possibilities in which several ways of behaving, several reactions and diverse comportments may be realized”.10 Nonetheless, my humanist and historicist approach differs not only from Foucault’s archaeology but also the lessons many poststructuralists take from his genealogy. My approach does reject foundationalism for an emphasis on the contingent processes by which people make the social world by acting on beliefs and discourses. But it emphatically rejects formal analyses of discourses as composed 10

M. Foucault, “The Subject and Power”, in Dreyfus and Rabinow, Michel Foucault, p. 221.

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of fixed quasi-​structural relations among concepts. It turns instead to historical analyses of beliefs, actions, and the patterns to which they give rise. Also, my approach does reject autonomy for an emphasis on the traditions against the background of which individuals come into being. But it emphatically rejects the suggestion that individuals are mere playthings of regimes of power. It turns instead to explicit accounts of people’s agency and local reasoning in responding to dilemmas and changing traditions and practices. 4

Conclusion

The philosophical part of this book has defended a postfoundational historicism and humanism. The chapter on knowledge argued that the content of propositions depends on their location in webs. The chapter on subjectivity argued that individuals are situated agents who can act intentionally for reasons of their own. This chapter has explored the consequences of these arguments for the human sciences. For a start, I argued that texts do not have intrinsic meanings. Texts have meanings only for particular people. To interpret a text is to say for whom the text had a specific meaning, whether for the author, readers, or oneself. Different people here ascribe different meanings to a text. Human scientists can thus decenter texts by describing the different meanings that people attach to them. When human scientists decenter texts, they show that texts do not have a given content but rather are open-​ ended social constructs. In addition, I argued that the social world consists of individuals, their intentionality, their actions, and the practices to which these actions give rise. Human scientists should not mistake practices (conceived as emergent entities based on people’s actions) for structures (conceived as social objects with independent causal powers). No doubt people regularly act on their beliefs about other people and even social practices, but when they do, it is their beliefs about the practices, not the practices themselves, that inspire their action. Finally, I argued that human scientists can explain beliefs and actions by locating them in the context of the agents’ wider web of beliefs. Human scientists can then explain webs of belief by locating them against the background of a historical tradition and by showing how agents’ changed this tradition in response to dilemmas. Postfoundational humanism overlaps with postmodernism even as it challenges it. On the one hand, a postfoundational rejection of pure presences and individual autonomy implies that we cannot explain texts, actions, or practices by appealing to a divine quality or fixed rationality that naturally inheres in individuals. Texts are indeterminate. Social life is contingent. On the other

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hand, a humanist recognition of situated agency and local reasoning implies that we also cannot explain texts, actions, or practices by appealing to quasi-​ structures. Texts are just physical objects to which people attach meaning. Social life is a product of human activity. Here my postfoundational historicism and humanism recoils from the determinism and reification that arise from the structuralism that lingers in some forms of postmodernism. The term “practice” recoils from reification to allow for subjectivity and intentionality. Practices are clusters of actions, where actors’ beliefs are constitutive of their actions. Institutions or structures do not have a content or path of development that is fixed independent of the contingent agency of the relevant people. Similarly, the term “tradition” recoils from determinism to allow for agency and contingency. Social inheritances never fix nor strictly limit the beliefs that people might come to adopt and so the actions that they might try to perform. Whereas Foucault defined his archaeological approach in contrast to a historical one he associated with humanism, I have defended a combination of postfoundationalism with historicism and humanism. In my view, human scientists should explain beliefs and actions not by reference to quasi-​structural epistemes but to traditions and dilemmas. It was this latter form of explanation that informed the earlier historical chapters of this book. Modern thought emerged from the diverse ways people responded to Darwinism and other dilemmas confronting the tradition of romantic organicism that had dominated nineteenth century thought. Because people responded to these dilemmas in diverse ways, human scientists can distinguish several contrasting traditions in modern thought, including humanism as well as postmodernism. Postmodernism arose more specifically against the background of structuralist and avant-​garde traditions that formed during the break with romantic organicism. Postmodern philosophy typically broke with the scientism of structuralism while remaining caught up with its differential theory of the sign. Postmodern ethics broke with the avant-​garde concept of the real while remaining caught up with its strategies of critique and transformation. In this part of the book, I have shown how postfoundational historicism and humanism challenges the reification and determinism that arise from the postmodernists’ debt to structuralism. In the following chapters, I will argue that postfoundational historicism and humanism also challenges the avant-​ garde themes lingering in postmodern ethics.

pa rt 3 Ethics

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On Critique Modern thought often views Man as a being that represents the world in ways that reflect changing historical contexts. This view of Man poses dilemmas of knowledge and subjectivity. If people make knowledge, how can it be knowledge of the world? If people’s beliefs and actions reflect their contexts, how can they act as agents to transform that context? Various strands of modern thought answer these questions differently. In the historical chapters of this book, I argued that postmodernists approach these questions against the background of structuralism and the avant-​garde. I also offered genealogical critiques of postmodernism, highlighting problems and aporias associated with this lingering debt to structuralism and the avant-​garde. In the philosophical chapters, I responded to the Modern dilemmas of knowledge and subjectivity by championing humanist and historicist alternatives to the structuralism that lies behind much postmodernism. I rejected accounts of postfoundationalism that rely on claims about the instability and indeterminacy of signs defined in terms set by structural linguistics. Instead I analyzed the implications of a postfoundationalism tied to meaning holism, that is, the claim that the meaning of a proposition depends on a web of beliefs. This holist version of postfoundationalism suggests that language is not a reified quasi-​structure but rather a vehicle that agents use to express varying beliefs. In the chapter on knowledge, I argued that meaning holism undercuts the aura of irrationalism that critics often sense around postmodernism. Postfoundationalists can ascribe objectivity to some beliefs by ­comparing rival webs of belief. In the chapter on subjectivity, I drew on meaning holism to restore a concern with agency, intentionality, and rationality. Postfoundationalists should adopt a humanism, according to which people are situated agents who can adopt beliefs and perform actions for reasons of their own. In the chapter on the human sciences, I argued that meaning holism and situated agency entail historicism. Postfoundationalists should reject the reifications and determinism associated with formal explanations of social life. Human scientists can explain beliefs by locating them in wider webs of belief, and they can explain these webs of belief by showing how people changed inherited traditions in response to dilemmas. Dilemmas of knowledge and subjectivity arise in ethics as well as philosophy. Can there be universal or objective values if people create various moralities in specific contexts? What freedom can people have if they are necessarily

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embedded in specific contexts? In this final part of the book, I consider these ethical questions. Although people’s responses to ethical questions do not follow inexorably from their philosophical analyses of knowledge and subjectivity, ethical beliefs reflect broader philosophical commitments. This part of the book draws on my historicism and humanism to develop a postfoundational ethics in contrast to postmodernism with its debt to the avant-​garde tradition. To begin, this chapter offers a historicist and humanist analysis of critique. Next the chapter on cosmopolitanism will defend a humanist ethic, concentrating especially on the unit of moral concern. Finally, the chapter on community will draw on the idea of situated agency to defend an open and democratic community. The modern idea of critique owes much to Immanuel Kant. Kant drew on Roman jurisprudence and early modern criticism of cultural texts to develop a technical philosophical concept of critique. Kantian critique explores the conditions and limits of human capacities such as reason and judgment. Later the work of left Hegelians, especially Karl Marx, gave critique a more ethical and political connotation. Marx rejected Kant’s attempt to offer critiques of human capacities as if people lived outside social and historical contexts. Marx used the Hegelian dialectic and his historical materialism to develop more immanent forms of critique. Marx’s critiques typically tried to show how objects that humans think are alien, such as God or commodities, actually are products of human agency. Postmodernists were led away from the Kantian idea of critique because they rejected the possibility of a pure reason by which to identify necessary limits. They were led away from Marx’s idea of critique because their debt to structuralism undermined a belief in human agency and their debt to the avant-​garde encouraged a belief in the totalizing nature of bourgeois society. Postmodernists rethought critique in terms of the sites and strategies promoted by the avant-​garde. They defined critique as constantly exploring and crossing the changing limits that affect people. According to Jean-​Francois Lyotard, critique is a practice of “drifting” during which people alter their perspective to disrupt whatever has become a settled norm. Lyotard argued that this “‘avant-​ garde’ research” is “the only type of activity that is effective” as critique, for it alone occurs “outside the system”.1 According to Michel Foucault, “the point is to transform critique conducted in the form of necessary limitation into a practical critique that takes the form of a possible transgression”.2 These 1 J-​F. Lyotard, “On Theory: An Interview”, in Driftworks (New York: Semiotext(e), 1984), p. 29. 2 M. Foucault, “What is Enlightenment?”, in P. Rabinow, ed., The Foucault Reader (New York: Pantheon, 1984), p. 45.

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avant-​garde ideas of critique have an ambiguous relationship to the Kantian idea of an inquiry into the conditions that make possible particular beliefs, actions, and practices. When postmodernists rejected the idea of necessary limits, they often gave up on analyses of the conditions that make possible the norms that dominate us. They turned to situational eruptions that seek to disrupt these norms. Sometimes, however, they also turned to historical studies of the contingent processes that made possible the norms that dominate the present moment. Foucault’s archaeologies and genealogies are such histories of the present. They provide critical accounts of the coming into being of current beliefs, actions, and practices. But, as I argued in the last chapter, Foucault’s historical studies are marred by his debt to modernist structuralism. I thus adopted an analysis of the human sciences that is more consistently historicist and humanist. Now I should ask: how do these historicist and humanist revisions to Foucault’s approach effect the idea of critique? If readers think that Foucault’s later writings are historicist and humanist, they can treat my analysis of genealogy as an elucidation of the philosophical basis of his later writings. Alternatively, if they think his later writings remain saturated by the structuralist hostility to historicism and humanism, they can treat my analysis of genealogy as an alternative to that implicit in his writings. My aim is less to pigeon-​hole Foucault than to provide a general discussion of historicism, to develop a historicist analysis of genealogy, and to explore the support that humanism lends to ideology critique. 1

Historicism

Historicism is the idea that human life can be understood only historically. The word “historicism” appeared in English in the early twentieth century as a translation of the Italian “storicisimo”, as used by Bernedtto Croce, or the German “historismus”, as used by Wilhelm Dilthey, Friedrich Meinecke, and Ernst Troeltsch. These European thinkers had openly debated a crisis of historicism. But the phrase “crisis of historicism” misleads. The debate covered ­worries about the philosophical and social consequences of too strong an emphasis on the historical nature of human life, but the worries affected people who believed in historical approaches. It is more accurate, therefore, to talk of a crisis in historicism. Historically minded thinkers worried that their historical worldview undercut itself, leading to destructive relativism in epistemology and ethics.

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The crisis of historicism clearly reflects broader dilemmas in Modern thought over knowledge and subjectivity. As I argued in the chapter on modernity, the nineteenth century saw the rise of organicism, romanticism, and historical styles of reasoning. Man appeared as a rational and creative being that could know and create the social world and gain freedom. Philosophers believed that human life and perhaps the natural world expressed a creative and purposeful intentionality. Auguste Comte, G. W. F. Hegel, Marx, and Herbert Spencer all argued that human societies could be understood properly only as products of historical processes. Many of the developmental historicists of the nineteenth century evoked principles that allegedly guided history. Different philosophers appealed to different principles but the most common principles included liberty, reason, nation, and statehood. These principles gave a progressive direction to the idea of history. By the early twentieth century, however, philosophers were grappling with ways in which this developmental historicism undermined its own accounts of knowledge and subjectivity. Before long, the First World War posed further dilemmas for developmental historicism, undermining people’s faith in reason and progress. It is no accident, therefore, that, as I suggested in the last chapter, structuralist themes can lead postmodernists to a reification and determinism more usually associated with positivism. Structuralism, positivism, and other forms of modernist empiricism all arose in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century in clear opposition to historicism. Structuralist and positivist approaches to the human sciences reject historicism for formal explanations that are atomistic and analytic. They replace the continuities and gradual changes of developmental histories with discrete and discontinuous units. They make sense of these units by analytic schemas and mathematical equations. Throughout the twentieth century, human scientists increasingly discussed signs rather than beliefs, behavior rather than actions, and institutions rather than practices. They then explained signs, behavior, and institutions by locating them in synchronic relationships and correlations rather than histories. Croce, Dilthey, Meinecke, and Troeltsch showed little sympathy for formal explanations. Sometimes they complained that formal explanations failed properly to allow for the role of intentionality, context, and change in human life. However, these historicists were also skeptical of the developmental perspectives that had dominated the nineteenth century. In their view, developmental historicists tamed context and change by postulating key principles as guiding progress. The developmental historicists elided contingency by locating choices in narratives of progress and rationality. Developmental historicists hid their retroactive construction of the stability of their narratives. So, in the early twentieth century, historicists began tentatively to explore a

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radical historicism that historicized the principles that had given stability and continuity to developmental narratives. The crisis of historicism came from this radical historicism with its suspicion of developmental narratives. When historicists queried principles of continuity, they raised a skeptical challenge to the possibility of objective historical knowledge. They drew attention to the ubiquity of change. They suggested that the past might have little in common with the present. They raised concerns about the distorting effects of present concepts and interests on accounts of the past. The philosophical chapters of this book defended a radical historicism that differed markedly from developmental historicism as well as postmodernism. In the chapter on knowledge, I argued that meaning and objectivity are the products of people using language and evaluating theories, not reflections of given truths. In the chapter on subjectivity, I argued that people are situated agents whose beliefs and actions are historically contingent, not the expressions of an unfolding rationality. In the chapter on the human sciences, I defended historical explanations based on pragmatic accounts of traditions and dilemmas rather than appeals to substantive principles. I also suggested that radical historicism overlaps with a nominalist social ontology. Social concepts such as state, society, class, economy, and nation lack any essence or set of principles that both constitutes the objects to which they refer and determines the other features of those objects. This nominalist social ontology might appear to preclude all aggregate concepts and explanations in the human sciences. However, as I argued in the previous chapter, radical historicists can still deploy aggregate concepts not only descriptively but also to do explanatory work provided they define them pragmatically. Explanations in the human sciences should take the form of histories that avoid appealing to universal or teleological principles. Radical historicism implies that the human sciences offer narratives without grandeur. Radical historicism overlaps with a nominalist social ontology that undermines accounts of history as developing in accord with universal or teleological principles. As a result, radical historicism highlights the contingency and diversity of historical objects. For a start, when radical historicists reject teleological narratives, they think of history as a series of contingent appropriations, modifications, and transformations leading from the old to the new. This contingency does not imply that change is inexplicable. Radical historicists just describe and explain change without appealing to overarching principles. I have argued, for example, that change occurs contingently as people reinterpret, modify, and transform traditions in response to novel circumstances. Change takes place when situated agents use their local reasoning to alter their beliefs and actions. In addition, when radical historicists highlight

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contingency, they portray history as radically open. There are always innumerable ways in which people might reinterpret, transform, or overpower beliefs, actions, and practices. Thus, radical historicists are suspicious of attempts to portray social life as uniform and its transformation as peaceful. They highlight the diverse meanings that attend any practice and the contests that go with efforts to transform practices. Today any historicist confronts the question posed in the crisis of historicism. Does historicism undercut itself and lead to a pernicious relativism? I responded to this question in the chapter on knowledge by defending an anti-​ foundational approach to objectivity and truth. Radical historicism overlaps with anti-​foundationalism. It opposes all truth-​claims that do not recognize their own historicity, including those masquerading as certainties based on pure reason or pure experience. From a historicist perspective, truth-​claims are necessarily saturated by the traditions against the background of which they are made. Nonetheless, it is important to emphasize yet again that a rejection of utter certainties does not entail a rejection of all claims to objectivity. Radical historicists can still make truth claims provided they think of “truth” not as timeless certainty but as “objectively valid for us” and “the best account of the world currently on offer”. A historicist concept of objectivity needs a convincing account of how to evaluate rival accounts of the world without appealing to pure experience and pure reason but it does not require suspension of all epistemic commitments. My historicist approach to objectivity not only avoids relativism; it also suggests that histories can play an important role in epistemic decisions. When people compare rival theories, there is a danger that they will tacitly assume the superiority of a particular perspective. Typically, if people disagree about the relative merits of theories, they can pull back from the disagreement to find shared beliefs about facts, evidence, and reasoning by which to compare those theories. However, shared beliefs can be elusive especially when people are comparing whole approaches embodying different accounts of valid reasoning and justified evidence. In these cases, the comparisons between rival approaches to the human sciences can focus on the relative ability of each to account for itself and its competitors. Because the human sciences concern human life and because the human sciences are themselves part of human life, a theory of the human sciences should account for the human sciences themselves including itself and its rivals. Any theory of human knowledge and subjectivity should be able to show it applies to the human sciences. When people apply theories such as postmodernism and historicism to the human sciences, they use the theory to explain the rise, development, and character of the theory and its rivals. Thus, to apply

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these theories to the human sciences is to make them engage one another. Each theory has to provide an account of the content and fate of the others. The history of the human sciences thus acts as a shared domain where rival theories meet one another. In this domain, a theory is comparatively successful if it provides a more satisfying account of the rise, content, and problems of others than can those others themselves. Thus, when historicists self-​reflexively locate their beliefs in particular traditions, their self-​reflexivity does not undercut their beliefs so much as contribute to an attempt to show that their historicism is the best theory of the human sciences currently on offer. Histories can play an important role in evaluating rival philosophical analyses of the human sciences. The historical chapters of this book provide an example. They show that postfoundational historicism and humanism inspires a plausible narrative covering both postmodernism and itself. In contrast, even if Foucault’s The Order of Things is a plausible narrative of Modern thought, it is hard to see how postmodernism could properly narrate itself. Foucault’s archaeological approach would have to narrate itself as a product of an irrational epistemic shift. Foucault’s version of genealogy would have to narrate itself as a product of power/​knowledge. Surely, however, if a theory is the result of an arational episteme or a regime of power, there is no reason to accept it. Postmodern theories here display a lack of reflexivity that undermines their epistemic standing. We should be profoundly suspicious of the inability of postmodernism properly to narrate itself. 2

Genealogy

Radical historicism provides a philosophical theory of genealogy. The influence of postmodernism means some readers will probably doubt the wisdom of seeking a theory of genealogy. Some critical theorists simply dismiss philosophical questions about the nature of critique and the commitments it entails. They describe genealogy as an inherently critical style of inquiry that avoids all substantive commitments of its own. Unfortunately, these critical theorists enable their critics to avoid particular genealogies and even deny the coherence of a genealogical stance. Some critics sidestep particular genealogies by allowing that their beliefs and practices have contingent and unsavory origins but adding that these origins do not make their beliefs and practices any less reasonable. Other critics reject the genealogical stance as incoherent because it demands substantive commitments of a kind it precludes. To reply, critical theorists must go beyond pious but empty invocations of genealogy as inherently critical. They must provide a robust philosophical theory of genealogy.

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A robust theory of genealogy should meet several criteria. For a start, it should explain how and when genealogies act as critiques. In addition, it should provide an account of the epistemic commitments of genealogy, and these commitments should avoid presenting genealogy as a totalizing critique that undercuts itself. Finally, it should cover the main genealogies of Friedrich Nietzsche and Foucault, ideally helping us to distinguish their genealogies from their other writings. To conceive of genealogy as an expression of radical historicism is to clarify its operation as denaturalizing critique. Radical historicism includes a nominalist social ontology that emphasizes the contingency and contestability of beliefs, actions, and practices. It denaturalizes those beliefs, actions, and practices that people think are in some way natural. When people believe that certain social norms or ways of life are natural or inevitable, radical historicists can denaturalize these norms and ways of life by showing how they arose in contingent historical contests. Genealogy works as a form of critique because it applies the denaturalizing tendency of radical historicism to unsettle those who ascribe a false naturalness to their particular beliefs and actions. Genealogy reveals the contingency and contestability of ideas and practices that hide their origins. Genealogy is not radical historicism but rather radical historicism in its critical guise. To identify genealogy with radical historicism would be to imply that genealogies need not be critical. Radical historicists can tell all kinds of narratives, some of which may involve a form of critical unmasking, but others of which may help us better to understand and vindicate aspects of ourselves. An example of a vindicatory narrative is my account of the rise of the genealogical stance out of a radical break with the principles and unities that characterized developmental historicism. Although we could distinguish between critical and vindicatory genealogies, it is easier to use “radical historicism” as an umbrella term covering both critical and vindicatory narratives, restricting “genealogy” to radical historicism in its critical guise. Genealogy is a radical historicist form of critique distinct from other types of critique. Genealogy differs from Kantian critique simply in being historicist. Kantian critique purportedly uses pure reason to discover universal truths, formal structures, and necessary limits. Genealogy uses empirical evidence to provide historical narratives of the contingent transformations of particular beliefs, traditions, and practices. The historicism of genealogy also distinguishes it from deconstruction. Deconstruction reveals instabilities and différance conceived as quasi-​metaphysical and even necessary properties of any signification. Genealogy resembles the decentering that I discussed in the previous chapter. It traces contests and diversity among the specific beliefs and

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actions of historical individuals. In addition, genealogy differs from dialectical critique in the radical nature of its historicism. The dialectic is characteristically developmental in that it implies internal contradictions drive a logical or historical movement towards resolution or synthesis. Genealogy rejects a developmental view. It highlights the contingency of historical movement and the absence of synthesis. The radical nature of this historicism also distinguishes genealogy from critical theory. Critical theorists believe that an end to ideology and power will allow people to act on their real interests and create a free society. They narrate a progressive or regressive teleology depending on their optimism or pessimism over the waxing or waning of ideology and power. Let me turn now to the epistemic commitments and coherence of the genealogical stance. The analysis of genealogy as a form of radical historicism explains why worries about its totalizing nature echo worries that historicism  leads to pernicious relativism. Sometimes genealogy’s overlap with historicism is mistaken, even by its advocates, for skepticism, relativism, or a ­suspension of epistemic commitments. Yet a moment’s thought dispels the idea that genealogy can avoid truth-​claims. Genealogists make claims about the truth of the factual parts of their histories and the philosophical ideas embedded in the genealogical stance. If genealogy tried to avoid all substantive commitments of its own, it would collapse into a totalizing critique that would undermine itself. If genealogists rejected the possibility of valid reasoning and objective knowledge, they would leave themselves no epistemic grounds on which to defend their specific genealogies or their genealogical stance. Genealogists should clarify the truths and concepts of truth they oppose, and the truths and concepts of truth on which they rely. Radical historicism explains how genealogists can challenge truth-​claims without rejecting all truth-​claims. On the one hand, genealogists continually question. They expose the particularity of perspectives that present themselves as universal and timeless truths. Further, their questioning can extend to their own perspective. They may wonder if their narratives and their genealogical stance are just particular perspectives. On the other hand, to question beliefs is not necessarily to reject them. To expose the particularity of a perspective is not necessarily to deny its truth. Genealogical critiques deny the truth of a perspective only if that perspective is incompatible with recognition of its own particularity. Genealogists may question their own narratives and even accept that the genealogical stance is a particular one that arose historically without thereby rejecting their narratives or the genealogical stance. Here genealogists can defend their truth-​claims and avoid undercutting themselves in the way I proposed radical historicists do so. Genealogists can define objectively valid knowledge as the product of a comparison among rival theories.

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The epistemic commitments associated with radical historicism clarify several other features of genealogy. For a start, they reinforce my earlier analysis of the critical nature of genealogy. As radical historicists reject truth as certainty, they denaturalize purportedly transcendent and universal perspectives that elide their own dependence on particular traditions. Equally, as radical historicists are not antirealists, their critiques depend on meticulous historical research. Genealogists try to trace the real histories and effects of beliefs, actions, and practices. In addition, the epistemic commitments of radical historicism help explain the philosophical style of many genealogies. As radical historicists are suspicious of utter certainties, they sometimes abandon standard claims to objectivity. They invent provocative aggregate concepts. Sometimes they even describe their narratives as speculative. Yet radical historicists still want to provide compelling narratives supported by evidence from empirical research that is, in Foucault’s words, “gray, meticulous, and patiently documentary”.3 Let me turn now to the adequacy of my philosophical theory of genealogy to the relevant works of Nietzsche and Foucault. Genealogy arose amid nineteenth century historicism. It had forerunners, notably in David Hume’s speculative account of the psychological origins of morality in customs and habits. But Nietzsche’s work marks a break with such forerunners. Its distinctiveness does not consist in his using genealogy to critical effect. Hume had used his approach to critical effect in the Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion where Philo explains religion as arising from the states of terror that go with depression and illness.4 What distinguished Nietzsche’s genealogies was the radical nature of his historicism. Far from treating certain principles developmentally, Nietzsche searched for the contingent and accidental sources of the belief in principles. Hume had searched beneath cultural ideas and practices to discover continuous features of human life that could justify those ideas and practices by suggesting they reflected common experiences. Paul Rée’s genealogy used the idea of the survival of the fittest to argue that modern morality is the highest stage of evolution so far reached.5 In contrast, Nietzsche suggested

3 M. Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History”, in The Foucault Reader, ed. P. Rabinow (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), p. 76. 4 D. Hume, “Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion”, in Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion and Other Writings, ed. D. Coleman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). 5 P. Rée, The Origin of the Moral Sensations, ed. R. Small (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2003).

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that these earlier genealogies had failed to inquire critically into the historical origins of moral ideas.6 Nietzsche reached genealogy from a background in historical philology. He had gone on to write historical studies on broader topics including the rise of tragedy. Many of his early studies are broadly documentary and thus compatible with the idea of history as an inductive science studying a progressive reality. The distinguishing feature of Nietzsche’s genealogies, including Beyond Good and Evil and On the Genealogy of Morality, is that they are denaturalizing critiques. Nietzsche’s genealogies showed the historical contingency of moral ideas and practices. He argued, for example, that Christian morality had shifted the meaning of “good” from the opposite of “bad” to the opposite of “evil”. Foucault’s use of genealogy is complicated by his debt to structuralism. His early archaeologies appealed to epistemes as quasi-​structures. They precluded historicism and left him no way of explaining the change from one episteme to another. In contrast, his genealogies introduced temporal complexity and contingency. He replaced epistemes with multiple surfaces in constant states of emergence, displacement, conquest, and flux. Where his archaeologies had presented a series of discrete synchronic moments, his genealogies introduced history as diachronic movement. Foucault’s genealogies differ from his archaeologies, therefore, not in their critical intent but their reliance on something like radical historicism. Out went the homogeneity and structural logic of epistemes. In came a greater sense of diversity and contingency. Even after Foucault turned to genealogy, his writings did not always clearly fit radical historicism. His Discipline and Punish resembles an inverted developmental history; it tells an anti-​progressive story of the triumph of darkness. Also, his account of governmentality resembles teleology; all roads converge inexorably on liberalism, and each road –​reason of state, discipline, pastoral power –​resembles an ideal type that never existed in pure form. Later genealogies inspired by Foucault often resemble the ideal types of modernist sociology or literary readings of texts divorced from their contexts more than 6 Nietzsche wrote, there is “no more important proposition” for historians than “that the origin of the emergence of a thing and its ultimate usefulness, its practical application and incorporation into a system of ends, are toto coelo separate; that anything in existence, having somehow come about, is continually interpreted anew, transformed and redirected to a new purpose by a power superior to it; that everything that occurs in the organic world consists of overpowering, dominating, and in their turn, overpowering and dominating consist of re-​ interpretation, adjustment, in the process of which their former ‘meaning’ and ‘purpose’ must necessarily be obscured or completely obliterated”. See F. Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality, ed. K. Ansell-​Pearson, trans. C. Diethe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 51.

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they do studies of specific beliefs and practices and their contingent shifts and transformations through time. Alas, genealogy is unlikely to emerge clearly as a form of radical historicism for as long as the human sciences remain dominated by modernist forms of knowledge. 3

Historical Ontology

Genealogy arguably works not only as immanent critique but also as a more Kantian critique. Foucault wrote: Three domains of genealogy are possible. First, a historical ontology of ourselves in relation to truth through which we constitute ourselves as subjects of knowledge; second, a historical ontology of ourselves in relation to a field of power through which we constitute ourselves as subjects acting on others; third, a historical ontology of ourselves in relation to ethics through which we constitute ourselves as moral agents.7 This idea of a historical ontology captures the way genealogies can reveal the conditions of possibility of some objects. When objects come to exist only as a result of contingent historical conditions, genealogies that trace those conditions also provide an analysis of the conditions that made those objects possible. Radical historicism illuminates how genealogy operates as historical ontology as well as immanent critique. When radical historicists reject the idea of social kinds with essences, they adopt a constructivist social ontology. Constructivism implies that social objects become possible only under contingent historical circumstances. The conditions of possibility for social objects are, in other words, that individuals historically happened to hold particular beliefs and perform certain actions. Thus, a genealogy of those beliefs and actions is a historical ontology of the related social object. Genealogies explore the historical ontology of social objects. They reveal the contingent conditions that make social objects possible.

7 M. Foucault, “On the Genealogy of Ethics: An Overview of Work in Progress”, in H. Dreyfus and P. Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), p. 237. Foucault went on to identify the three axes of truth, power, and ethics with respectively The Order of Things, Discipline and Punish, and The History of Sexuality.

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Genealogy might seem to have the same critical effect on all its objects. Foucault distinguished domains of genealogy according to the subjectivities they explore, but he did not distinguish them according to their critical effects. In contrast, I have pointed to a distinction between genealogies that tackle the epistemological status of beliefs and those that tackle the ontology of practices. The critical effect of genealogies varies with the epistemological and ontological nature of the beliefs and objects they explore. Consider the critical impact of genealogies on objects with different ontologies. I introduced the relevant ontological distinctions in the excursus on realism in the chapter on knowledge. There I suggested that linguistic social constructivists argue not only that people make the social world by acting on beliefs and meanings but also that they make the beliefs on which they act. Now I can add that radical historicism provides a further defense of linguistic social constructivism. Radical historicism contrasts with attempts to postulate developmental or quasi-​structural logics in the human sciences. Its emphasis on contingency undermines definitions of social objects by reference to essences determining their other features. Radical historicism leads to an antiessentialist view of social concepts. Further, although this antiessentialism is a form of linguistic social constructivism, it does not entail antirealism. Radical historicists might fend off antirealism by insisting that there is a real world that beliefs track. This combination of radical historicism and realism then points to a distinction among socially constructed concepts. Some constructed concepts capture parts of social life; others do not. The distinction is, to echo terms used in the chapter on knowledge, one between pragmatic and unfounded concepts. The point I want to make now is that the differences between unfounded and pragmatic concepts mean genealogies of them have different critical effects. Unfounded concepts do not capture any real commonalities among objects. They have no real content. Although people assume that the concept refers to a type of object characterized by certain resemblances, there is no such type. The concept suggests that objects share resemblance they do not. Genealogies of unfounded concepts trace the histories that led people wrongly to treat objects as instances of a type characterized by shared features. These genealogies undermine our belief in the adequacy of the relevant concept and so actions and practices associated with it. If people believe that a concept picks out a genuine type characterized by family resemblances, a genealogy can challenge that belief by showing that there are no such resemblances and that the concept arose for other reasons. The genealogy shows that the concept is a myth. It shows people are falsely ascribing imagined properties to a group of objects.

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Genealogies challenge the mythology of unfounded concepts. An example is Roland Barthes account of the associations of the concept “wine” in French society.8 Barthes showed that “wine” does not only refer to a type of drink; it symbolizes health, national identity, and social equality. He argued that this symbolism is arbitrary; it ignores the health hazards of excessive drinking. He suggested that the symbolism came from a wish to sell wine and a bourgeois tradition of nationalism. He implied that although wine is a type of drink, there is no type “wine” that is healthy, French, and egalitarian –​that concept of wine is a myth. Unlike unfounded concepts, pragmatic concepts pick out real types. Pragmatic concepts refer to objects that share family resemblances but not an essence. They have vague content and fuzzy boundaries that someone can define and justify by her purposes. Pragmatic concepts are socially constructed in that it is people who decide to divide the world into one set of types characterized by one set of family resemblances rather than another. However, although these concepts are socially constructed, they are satisfied by a group of objects that really do share certain resemblances. Genealogies of pragmatic concepts reveal the contingent historical processes by which people came to cluster objects together in one way capturing one set of resemblances. These genealogies can challenge pragmatic concepts in one of two ways. First, they can show that the original justification for adopting a pragmatic concept was that it contributed to a purpose we no longer believe in. In these cases, we will not think our beliefs wrong or our concepts mistaken, we will merely think that they do not serve us well. Second, genealogies will undermine the beliefs associated with a pragmatic concept if we mistakenly believe the concept refers to a group of objects with a common essence. When we believe a concept is a unique reflection of natural kinds found in the world, a genealogy can undermine that belief, showing the concept to be just one of several ways of dividing objects into groups. In these cases, the genealogy works as an immanent critique in that to accept the truth of the genealogy is to imply that one’s earlier beliefs were false. These genealogies show us that our concepts are reifications. They show that we were treating products of human activity as if they were given independent of such activity.

8 R. Barthes, “Wine and Milk”, in R. Barthes, Mythologies. Barthes conceived of his mythologies as denaturalizing critiques in a way that echoes my analysis of genealogy. He wrote, “the starting point of these reflections was usually a feeling of impatience at the sight of the ‘naturalness’ with which newspapers, art, and common sense dress up a reality which, even though it is the one we life in, is undoubtedly determined by history” (p. 11).

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Genealogies challenge the reification of pragmatic concepts. A possible example is the term “democracy”. Democracy is not a natural kind. There is no straightforward dichotomy between states that do and do not have an essential feature or set of features that do or do not make them democratic. The term “democracy” refers to a vague set of beliefs and actions including popular sovereignty, voting, representation, participation, competing parties, and accountability. We decide what beliefs and actions to include and what not to include, and we can justify our decision only by reference to our purposes. Further, the properties and behavior of a democracy do not arise simply from its being a democracy –​or at least they do so only tautologically if we include the relevant properties in our definition of a democracy. The nature of any given democracy depends instead on the contingent beliefs and actions of particular people. Nonetheless, modernist empiricists sometimes treat democracy not as a pragmatic concept but as a natural kind. They reify democracy, operationalizing it in order to formulate and test correlations such as that which suggests democratic states do not go to war with one another. A genealogy might remind modernist empiricists that “democracy” does not refer to a natural kind that inherently has peaceful relations. It refers to sets of beliefs and actions that can lead to peace depending on historical contingencies and even on how they define its boundaries. A genealogy might suggest that democracies have had peaceful relations not because of their intrinsic properties but because historically human scientists have altered their definitions of democracy to capture family resemblances among America and her allies.9 It is worth pausing here to discuss in greater detail a particular type of pragmatic concept that is especially vulnerable to genealogical critique: self-​fulfilling concepts. Although self-​fulfilling concepts are pragmatic, genealogies reveal them also to be akin to myths. These concepts are pragmatic in that they collect objects that share a property or set of properties. Yet these objects share the relevant property only because people have adopted and acted on the concept that ascribes that property to those objects. It is only because the concept informs practices that it can refer to a real type. If people did not act on the concept, it would be unfounded. Genealogies can thus have a special critical effect on self-​fulfilling concepts. Genealogies challenge the reification of self-​fulfilling concepts as they do the reification of any other pragmatic concept. If people believe the concept refers to natural kinds or provides a

9 Compare I. Oren, Our Enemies and US: America’s Rivalries and the Making of Political Science (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003).

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uniquely apt way of capturing types in the world, a genealogy can undermine this belief. In addition, however, genealogies challenge the artificiality of self-​ fulfilling concepts and practices based on them. When genealogies denaturalize a self-​fulfilling concept, they imply that it was initially unfounded and only later, because it altered practices, did it come to pick out a real type. These genealogies undermine not only the claim that the concept refers to a natural kind, but also the claim that the concept arose as a reflection of a previously existing social type. Genealogies challenge both the reification and the artificiality of self-​ fulfilling concepts. All social concepts are self-​fulfilling in that they refer to types that arise from actions predicated on people having certain concepts. However, some social concepts refer to types that do not depend on people having that particular concept. For example, capitalism may refer to a set of economic relations that can exist even if people have no concept of capitalism. Other social concepts are more directly self-​fulfilling. A possible example is the idea that girls are bad at science. A genealogy might show how this idea arose as a contingent extension of normative ideas about the role of women. Then once the idea arose, people began to alter the way they spoke to girls, the academic subjects they taught them, and the pursuits they encouraged them to adopt. As a result, girls really may have come to do less well than boys in science. Critical theorists should not ignore the different critical effects that genealogy has on different objects. The distinctions between unfounded, pragmatic, and self-​fulfilling concepts are important. They are not just philosophical niceties. They have substantive ethical and political consequences. For example, they explain how critical theorists can reject essentialist definitions of race and gender while recognizing racial and gendered types exist in society today with harmful results. Critical theorists can accept that racial and gendered types are valid as pragmatic concepts (not natural ones) and then argue that these types are self-​fulfilling ones. Further, a critical recognition of the pragmatic force of racial and gendered types is a precondition of any account of the nature and effects of such types, not to mention a precondition of social policies that seek actively to transform such types. Once we undermine self-​ fulfilling concepts and eliminate their social effects, we might leave them to the historian. Until then, however, we have to use the pragmatic concepts we challenge as self-​fulfilling if we are adequately to discuss their social effects and how best to undermine them.

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Ideology Critique

As a postfoundational historicism can sustain genealogies, so a postfoundational humanism can sustain ideology critique. Marxism spread a view of ideology as false consciousness reflecting distorted social relations. Postmodernists reject this view of ideology.10 They deny that consciousness passively reflects material relations. They deny that critics have privileged access to a scientific truth by which to judge ideological beliefs false. Typically they conclude that postfoundationalism cannot sustain ideology critique. But this conclusion is too strong. Clearly, because postfoundationalists oppose reductionism, they cannot define ideology as a passive reflection of a distorted material life. However, they can define ideology by distorted beliefs. Poststructuralists neglect this possibility because of their hostility to humanism, agency, and the language of intentionality and belief. In contrast, postfoundational humanism opens the possibility of rethinking ideology as distorted belief. A distinction between proper and distorted consciousness can inspire an analysis of ideology critique as exposing distorted forms of consciousness. Yet postfoundationalism precludes both the identification of distorted belief with false belief and the identification of proper belief with any substantive content including the real interests of a class. Postfoundationalism here implies that the distinction between proper and distorted belief is a conceptual one. A postfoundational and humanist theory of ideology should thus contain three parts. First, the theory should analyze distorted belief by the inner constitution of consciousness. The distortions in an ideological superstructure do not reflect the conflicts of a material base. They arise as failures in consciousness itself. Second, the theory should include an account of the reasons people have for adopting distorted beliefs. As social relations do not determine consciousness, agents must adopt distorted beliefs for reasons of their own. Finally, the theory should consider how distorted beliefs spread through society. Let me begin with the analysis of distorted belief.11 To avoid equating ­distorted beliefs with false ones, postfoundationalists must define proper and distorted belief by the inner constitution of consciousness. They need a normative account of the proper workings of consciousness against which to identify distortions. Fortunately the route to an account of proper belief begins 10 M. Foucault, Power/​Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–​77, ed. C. Gordon (Brighton: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1980), p. 118. 11 For a more detailed analysis of distorted beliefs and the forms of explanation appropriate to them, see M. Bevir, The Logic of the History of Ideas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 265–​308.

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from my earlier analysis of subjectivity. People are intentional agents capable of local reasoning, so proper beliefs are conscious and rational. A norm of consciousness requires that people hold beliefs intentionally for reasons they could acknowledge. If people repress their beliefs and desires in their unconscious, the beliefs they express are not their actual beliefs. They can carry on telling themselves they hold the beliefs they express only by refusing to acknowledge their actual beliefs. A norm of rationality then requires that people’s beliefs be internally consistent. If people hold inconsistent beliefs, they hold beliefs that they themselves regard as deficient since the one implies the falsity of the other. So, distorted beliefs are either unconscious or irrational. Either way, the distorted nature of the beliefs requires postulating a split in the agent’s intentionality. The agent has two different webs of belief that cannot come together. With the unconscious, there are the beliefs that they think they hold and the beliefs that they repress. With irrationality, they hold two webs of belief consciously but these cannot fit with each other. Consider now the nature of the reasons people have for adopting distorted beliefs. Proper beliefs are those people adopt because they appear true. Belief-​ formation gets corrupted when people hold or express beliefs in accord with a preference other than for holding true beliefs. Distorted beliefs are, in other words, products of rogue preferences. Unconscious beliefs arise when rogue preferences lead people to repress their actual beliefs. For example, if politicians deceive themselves into believing that they will win an election, their conscious beliefs are a form of wishful thinking. Their preference for winning has led them to repress their unconscious belief that they will lose. The act of repression requires that the effect of the rogue preference and the unconscious beliefs remain outside consciousness. Self-​deceivers remain unaware of what they do. A critic typically justifies ascribing unconscious beliefs and rogue preferences to self-​deceivers by pointing to a tension between their actions and their expressed beliefs. Some irrational beliefs also arise from the influence of rogue preferences. Cold irrationality lacks motive. It reflects something like a chemical imbalance or a lack of intelligence. It resembles a mistake and is irrelevant to ideology critique. In contrast, hot irrationality has a motive, so it resembles self-​deception. The differences are that in hot irrationality the two webs of belief must contradict each other and the agent can be aware of what is going on. For example, politicians could consciously believe they are going to win an election while also knowing they are kidding themselves and they will lose. Let me turn, finally, to the spread of distorted beliefs through society. Here I can echo my discussion of power in the chapter on the human sciences. Like power, ideologies do not have a center. They do not spread because of the real

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interests of a group. Distorted beliefs need not even serve the preferences of the people who hold them; although people adopt distorted beliefs because of rogue preferences, the beliefs need not succeed in serving their purpose. Like power, ideologies spread not outwards from an alleged center but variously across intricate webs. Their diffusion occurs through the contingent beliefs and actions of individuals. Ideologies could conceivably spread because several individuals adopted the same distorted beliefs due to similar rogue preferences. Usually, however, distorted beliefs become a widespread ideology only when people begin to adopt them as proper beliefs. Ideologies spread beyond their origins in distorted belief only when other people adopt them sincerely and consciously. Here the spread of ideologies typically reflects restrictive and constitutive power. Restrictive power refers to the way other peoples’ actions influence what someone can do. Ideologies can spread as a result, for example, of censorship restricting what people can read. Still, ideologies usually spread largely because of the plausibility of the ideas in them. Here constitutive power refers to the role of contexts in giving people their initial webs of belief. Ideologies typically spread because people inherit traditions that make them seem plausible or even inherit them as part of a tradition. My postfoundational theory of ideology replaces reductionism and scientism with a conceptual analysis of distorted beliefs and their diffusion. Ideologies are not the reflections of distorted social relations but products of distortions in consciousness itself. Ideologies contain distorted beliefs because consciousness is split by rogue preferences. Equally, however, ideologies characteristically take on a life apart from such distortions. They spread through society because of their plausibility and the actions of those immersed in them. This theory of ideology echoes themes from the historicist genealogies and critical theories that predated poststructuralism with its hostility to humanism. A good example is Nietzsche’s account of ressentiment in On the Genealogy of Morality.12 Nietzsche combined genealogy with ideological critique, arguing that certain moral values are products of the unconscious effect of rogue preferences. On the one hand, Nietzsche used a historicist genealogy to challenge the idea that “good” refers to actions or people that resemble each other in being altruistic. He argued that the actions and people that are called “good” do not constitute a type based on family resemblances. Sometimes people use “good” in contrast to “bad” to refer to aristocratic and noble qualities. At other times they use “good” in contrast to “evil” to refer to aesthetic, self-​denying, and altruistic qualities. Nietzsche also suggested that the latter qualities are called 12 Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality.

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“good” not because of an intrinsic goodness in them but as a historical myth. On the other hand, however, Nietzsche used ideology critique to provide a psychological explanation of this myth. He argued that this “slave morality” arose as an expression of the ressentiment the weak feel towards the powerful. The weak come to hate the strong, but they do not seek revenge through action, as would the noble. Instead, they deceive themselves into believing that they are good and so will gain everlasting life whereas the strong are evil and will be punished. For Nietzsche, the slave revolt in morality occurred when people repressed their sense of weakness and inferiority, unconsciously reassigning blame for it to an external enemy on whom they would get revenge in the Last Judgment. 5

Conclusion

In this chapter I examined the resources for critique associated with the positions that I defended in the philosophical chapters of this book. I argued that postfoundational historicism provides a possible analysis of genealogy, and postfoundational humanism revitalizes ideology critique. Genealogy relies on a radical historicism to denaturalize beliefs, actions, and practices that present themselves as inherently rational or inevitable. By thinking of genealogy as a historicist form of critique, I defended it against charges that it collapses into self-​defeating relativism and totalizing critique. Genealogies rely on claims about the truth of historicism and the histories they tell. These truth claims allow them to unsettle perspectives that present themselves as given in a way that ignores historicism. Also, by relating genealogy to historicist ontology, I distinguished the effects genealogy has on different objects. The critical import of genealogy varies across unfounded, pragmatic, and self-​fulfilling concepts. Ideology critique is compatible with genealogy but different from it. Ideology critique relies less on historical unmasking than on psychological unmasking. It exposes the ways rogue preferences lead to the distortions associated with the unconscious and motivated irrationality. Some postmodernists wrote critiques that closely resemble those I have defended. Foucault’s genealogies in particular embody a position akin to my radical historicism. To that extent, my analysis of genealogy and historical ontology may stand as an elucidation of the philosophical commitments needed to sustain Foucault’s genealogies. My radical historicism certainly fits Foucault’s genealogies better than Derrida’s deconstruction. The radical historicist emphases on contingency and diversity differ importantly from Derrida’s focus on quasi-​structural instabilities and the other. Radical historicism here

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echoes the shift I proposed in the chapter on the human sciences from deconstruction to decentering. Deconstruction characteristically involves a close reading of a particular text to reveal the irreconcilably contradictory meanings inherent in it. Genealogy and ideology critique focus on historical beliefs, actions, and practices. They explore the gaps between, for example, public norms and personal habits, what people say and do, and metropolitan rules and local actions. Instead of exposing quasi-​structural instabilities or a logic of supplementarity in a text, they describe the contingent emergence, travails, and transformations of ideas and practices over time. Instead of exploring the other of a concept, they describe its diverse uses and its relation to various actions. Genealogy and ideology critique are, in other words, about material life. They use texts as evidence of the traditions and practices in which people happen to come to be as they are and do what they do. These contexts are specific and concrete. They consist of actions, interactions, relationships, and practices. They include laws, rules, norms, and institutions. They rely on natural and social technologies, instruments, and forces.

chapter 9

On Universalism The ethical force of critique comes from its challenges to existing ways of being. When critique denaturalizes beliefs or practices, it encourages people to explore new possibilities and transform themselves. When critique shows that something people see as unavoidable is actually contestable and contingent, it frees them to try novel alternatives. These claims about the transformative and emancipatory potential of critique depend on my analysis of subjectivity. When postmodernists are hostile to agency, it makes little sense for them to claim that critique opens a space in which people can choose to be otherwise. When they explain change as random fluctuations and blind chance, they leave little room for intentional innovation to emerge out of critique. It is only once postfoundationalists accept a humanist analysis of subjectivity that critique can appear as a source of self-​transformation and emancipation. Critique acquires an ethical dimension only if it is combined with humanism. Although critique has a transformative quality, it is not an ethical theory and it is largely impotent as a guide to action. Even when postfoundationalists accept a humanist analysis of critique, it has limited ethical impact. Critique improves empirical accounts of ethics. It draws attention to the history of ethical discourses, the operation of ethical norms, and the fact that norms sometimes operate contrary to the discourses about them. Critique does little to bolster normative accounts of ethics. It does not tell people which possibilities to pursue and how to transform themselves. Some critical theorists happily accept that they are opening possibilities without providing normative analyses of the various possibilities. However, these critical theorists can avoid normative analysis only at the cost of being unable to distinguish between good and bad forms of power and authority, better and worse laws and practices, and good and bad forms of life. Their critical posture, like any particular critique, is impotent when it comes to indicating what people should do if they accept it. A critique can reveal the disgraceful origins of a norm but it cannot tell people whether they should reject the norm or merely rethink their reasons for accepting it. A critique can point to a gap between a discourse about a norm and the practice of that norm but it cannot tell people whether they should bring the norm into line with the practice or the practice into line with the norm. When people accept a critique, they confront an ethical question about what they should do, but the critique does not help them answer that question.

© Mark Bevir, 2022 | DOI:10.1163/9789004513556_010

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The limited role of critique is not a problem. It just means that critical theorists need a normative theory consistent with their analysis of critique. Problems would arise only if postfoundationalism precluded all ethical claims, that is, if postfoundationalism led inexorably to relativism or nihilism. This chapter focuses, therefore, on the dilemma of knowledge in ethics. It asks, how can postfoundationalists justify normative theories? The next chapter will consider the content of the ethical values postfoundationalists should defend. Jacques Derrida is the postmodernist who most consistently and forcefully discussed ethical concerns. His early work deconstructed texts to expose logocentric approaches to meaning and truth. Then, as I discussed in the chapter on the avant-​garde, in the mid-​1980s, Derrida started addressing ethical issues directly. He rejected nihilism and relativism, arguing that deconstruction instantiated an ethical responsibility to the other. Once again, however, he made his point less by defending clear propositions than by deconstructing texts. This chapter thus resembles that on knowledge in engaging Derrida through his reading of other thinkers. I begin by discussing Derrida’s reading of Martin Heidegger to show how postfoundationalism can avoid ethical relativism and inspire a modified cosmopolitanism.1 Only thereafter do I consider whether postfoundationalism also can avoid nihilism. 1

Cosmopolitanism

What are the ethical implications of postfoundationalism? Postmodernists often focus on identity, difference, and diversity. They appear hostile to universalism. They denounce universal perspectives as inherently flawed and immoral. In particular, when postmodernists argue that all ethics arise in particular contexts, they often imply that to extend an ethic beyond its context is tantamount to cultural imperialism. Jean-​Francois Lyotard argued that any meta-​narrative is inherently unjust as it blocks the imagination and the right of response among those whose particular narratives place them outside the identities it sanctions. He wrote, “the idea that I think we need today in order

1 Derrida pursues similar ethical arguments in a number of works. As in the chapter on knowledge, so here I am not providing a comprehensive survey of his work, but rather tracking specific works to develop arguments. Derrida’s cosmopolitanism became fully apparent with J. Derrida and A. Dufourmantelle, Of Hospitality (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000); and J. Derrida, On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness (London: Routledge: 2001). For his critique of cultural identities also see J. Derrida, The Other Heading: Reflections on Today’s Europe, trans. P-​A Brault, intro. M. Naas (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992).

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to make decisions in political matters cannot be the idea of the totality, or of the unity, of a body” –​“it can only be the idea of a multiplicity or of a diversity”.2 Critics respond by arguing that postfoundationalism leads inexorably to a pernicious relativism in which ethical norms cover only those people whose language game generates them. In the critics’ view, postfoundationalism reduces ethical claims to products of particular narratives and cultures. The critics conclude that postfoundationalists cannot properly defend the universality of ethical principles. Unlike these critics, I believe that postfoundationalism inspires a kind of universalism. Postfoundationalists should question the stability of ethical claims while still insisting on their universality. They should uphold a universal cosmopolitanism that recognizes the legitimacy and desirability of difference and diversity. I also think that Derrida argued for just such a universal cosmopolitanism. My aim in this chapter is thus to show how Derrida’s argument works. Specifically, I want to show that his argument works even for those who reject deconstruction for postfoundational historicism and humanism. In Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question, Derrida tracked the place of “spirit” and spirit in Heidegger. “Could it be”, he asked, that from 1927 to 1953 Heidegger “forgot to avoid?”3 Did Heidegger avow a metaphysical concept of spirit that somehow implicated his philosophy in Nazism? If we forgot to avoid metaphysics, would we too be in danger of reifying nations, cultures, and identities in a way that entails spiritual racism and hostility to the Other? Derrida suggested here that we can avoid spiritual racism only by adopting a non-​metaphysical universalism –​a cosmopolitanism open to difference. Elsewhere he distinguished his non-​metaphysical cosmopolitanism from liberal universalism. He defended an ethic of friendship to the Other, not an agreed set of principles and rights. 1.1 “Spirit” and Spirit Heidegger used phenomenology to explore the nature of Being. Like Edmund Husserl, he wanted to break out of a dichotomy of subject and object so as to return to an original experience. Unlike Husserl, he identified this original experience with being in the world, not consciousness. Heidegger argued that lived experience provides the route to Being. He believed that humans alone experience Being as a question, and that they approach Being by holding 2 J-​F. Lyotard, with J-​L Thebaud, Just Gaming (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), p. 94. 3 J. Derrida, Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question, trans. G. Bennington and R. Bowlby (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), p. 2.

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themselves open to this question. Later, however, Heidegger turned from this phenomenological analysis of lived experience to an attempt to recover Being by escaping metaphysics through the study of language and history. He argued that instead of people finding Being in their own existence, Being reveals itself to them through language. People should listen to language to hear what Being has to tell them. Throughout his life, Heidegger tried to make Being a question. He thought of spirit as the posing of the question of Being through lived experience in his early work or language, history, and the overcoming of metaphysics in his later work. In Of Spirit, Derrida argued that Heidegger’s use of spirit reveals an “equivocation or indecision, the edging or dividing path which ought, according to Heidegger, to pass between a Greek or Christian –​even onto-​theological –​ determination of pneuma or spiritus, and a thinking of Geist which would be other and more originary”.4 Heidegger defined spirit in Being and Time by reference to what it is not; spirit is not a substance, it is not the thing in itself. He implied that if people understand spirit as the presence of being, they get caught up in questions of the cogito and so fail to raise the question of Being. Heidegger said that “spirit” contains the truth of Being, but he used it mainly to suggest the absence of spirit. Derrida thus distinguished spirit defined positively in relation to the cogito or being –​a concept that Heidegger seemed to reject –​from “spirit” defined negatively in relation to the question of Being –​ a concept that Heidegger seemed to endorse. Heidegger wrote of the importance of avoiding spirit even as he championed the notion of “spirit”. It is as if he borrowed the concept of spirit to evoke ideas and serve purposes other than those conventionally associated with it. For Derrida, therefore, there are two contrasting ideas of spirit in Heidegger’s work. On the one hand, if spirit becomes the site of a positive truth, it is reified, so it becomes a metaphysical or onto-​theological concept. Spirit becomes a possible answer to the question. On the other hand, if “spirit” is a radical absence (a term under erasure and in scare quotes), it points to a non-​metaphysical thinking associated with Heidegger’s later writings and Derrida’s deconstruction. Derrida, in a typical deconstructive reading, tried not to resolve these two interpretations of spirit in Heidegger but to show how they coexist in tension. Derrida argued that when people read Heidegger, they find both concepts operating simultaneously. Nonetheless, Derrida suggested that the metaphysical concept of spirit dominates Heidegger’s Rectoral Address of 1933 and his Introduction to Metaphysics of 1935, whereas the non-​metaphysical 4 Derrida, Of Spirit, p.82.

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concept of “spirit” dominates his later writings, notably the essay on Georg Trakl, “Language in the Poem”. Although we should not reduce complex shifts in Heidegger’s politics to his changing philosophy, Derrida’s implication is clear: Heidegger’s involvement with the National Socialist Party coincided with his reliance on a concept of spirit that forgot to avoid metaphysics. 1.2 Spirit and Racism Heidegger’s use of spirit to convey the truth of Being leads –​if not inexorably then with a certain drift –​to a concept of the Volk that is dangerously close to that of the National Socialists. Derrida traced this drift in Heidegger’s infamous Rectoral Address of 1933, “The Self-​assertion of the German University”. Heidegger there defined spirit in positive terms as “the determined resolve to the essence of Being”. The Rectoral Address derives its momentum from this positive concept of spirit. Heidegger argued that self-​assertion consists in a conscious affirmation of a spiritual mission. To be fully human, people must embrace spirit. Fully to assert their humanity, people have to pose the question of Being. Heidegger then associated the particular German character of the University with such an affirmation of a spiritual mission. He argued that any Volk has a spiritual world, and the power of this world reflects the strength of its embrace of spirit, that is, the language and history through which its people approach Being. In his view, a developed spiritual world “comes from preserving at the most profound level the forces that are rooted in the soil and blood of a Volk, the power to arouse most inwardly and to shake most extensively the Volk’s existence”.5 For Heidegger, only a developed spiritual world guarantees the greatness of the Volk. Derrida traced a similar concept of spirit through Heidegger’s Introduction to Metaphysics. There Heidegger explicitly stood back from any particular politics in order to stress the importance of Being-​resolute. He argued that what matters is that people hold themselves open to Being, affirming a spiritual mission. Compared to this Being-​resolute, the specific direction of their being is of little importance. Yet, Heidegger added, the world today shows a decadent spirit. He called for greater resoluteness. He wanted a renewed focus on the spiritual mission and so a return to the question of Being. Once again, he then equated this renewal with a strengthening of the particular spiritual world of the German people.

5 M. Heidegger, “The Self-​assertion of the German University”, in R. Wolin, ed., The Heidegger Controversy: A Critical Reader (Cambridge, MA: mit Press, 1993), pp. 33–​4.

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According to Derrida, Heidegger was guilty in the Rectoral Address and the Introduction of Metaphysics of both sanctioning Nazism and adopting metaphysical ideas. Heidegger adopted a positive concept of spirit that encouraged him to uphold a positive ideal of a spiritual mission and to identify this mission with National Socialism. Heidegger committed himself to the National Socialist Party because it embodied an aspiration towards a powerful spiritual Volk, albeit one based on a spiritual mission rather than a racist biology. Heidegger later distinguished sharply between his spiritual mission and the Nazis’ biology of race. He told the Rector of Freiberg University, “it sufficed for me to express my fundamental philosophical positions against the dogmatism and primitivism of Rosenberg’s biologism”. “I sought to show that language was not the biological-​racial essence of man, but conversely, that the essence of man was based in language as a basic reality of spirit”.6 Derrida spent considerable time in Of Spirit questioning the force of this distinction. He suggested that Heidegger’s entanglement with metaphysics does not overcome racism so much as displace it from biology to spirit. Heidegger ascribed the responsibility for the spiritual mission to the German people. He argued that the German people have a special mission to awaken spirit and revive the question of Being. More particularly, he linked the fate of spirit to that of the German language. He implied that only the German people and their language could produce Being out of being. Surely however this spiritual elevation of a particular people contains a racial gesture? As Derrida wrote, “the German character of this university is not a secondary or contingent predicate, it cannot be dissociated from this affirmation of spirit”.7 Heidegger, like the Nazis, proclaimed the greatness of the German Volk. It is just that his argument began with spirit and moved from there to race and biology rather than beginning with biology and moving to race and spirit. Yet, Derrida asked: “by thus inverting the direction of determination, is Heidegger alleviating or aggravating this ‘thought of race’? Is a metaphysics of race more or less serious than a naturalism or a biologism of race?”8 Derrida linked Heidegger’s spiritual racism to forgetting to put spirit under erasure. Heidegger strove to avoid metaphysics in both his early and later writings, but from 1934 to 1945 he forgot to hold himself open to Being and so became entangled with metaphysics and National Socialism. Derrida’s reading of Heidegger raises two questions: What is it about a metaphysical concept of 6 M. Heidegger, “Letter to the Rector of Freiburg University, November 4, 1945”, in Wolin, ed., Heidegger Controversy, p. 64. 7 Derrida, Of Spirit, p. 33. 8 Derrida, Of Spirit, p. 74.

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spirit that raises the specter of racism? Can non-​metaphysical thinking avoid spiritual as well as biological racism? 1.3 Racism and Hospitality What is it about a metaphysical concept of spirit that raises the specter of racism? Derrida’s reading of Heidegger highlights the danger of postulating any fixed content, no matter how loosely defined, as the basis of any identity, nation, or race. We should not define a culture by reference to a spiritual mission or any other positive content. Instead we should question fixed identities by deconstructing them, or rather, as I argued in the chapter on the human sciences, by decentering them. We should remain open and responsible to the Other. Derrida made the case for rejecting fixed identities and remaining open to the Other by insisting that language is prior to the question of Being. It was because Heidegger gave priority to the question of Being that he defined a positive spiritual mission as an engagement with this question, thereby making this mission the basis for the self-​assertion of the German people. Derrida countered that language is prior to the question. He claimed that a promise “has already taken place wherever language comes” –​“a sort of promise of originary alliance to which we must have in some sense already acquiesced, already said yes, given a pledge” –​and this promise entails a responsibility to the Other.9 For Derrida, a promise of alliance and so a responsibility to the Other come before any positive concept of spirit, even one based on a question. Heidegger and Derrida held different concepts of the other. Heidegger relied on an existential concept of the other as a positive presence in the individual’s lifeworld. This existential other refers to the people with whom we build a shared life-​world. It refers to people with whom we share an identity or with whom we join in a common enterprise. In contrast, Derrida introduced an ethical concept of the Other as the logical possibility of someone absent from the individual’s lifeworld. The Other refers to those who may be beyond our lifeworld. It reminds us of people who do not share the relevant identity or who are not engaged in the relevant enterprise but to whom we still have a moral responsibility. The Other evokes “a we which is perhaps not given”.10 According to Heidegger, we cannot know ourselves and address the question of Being except in relation to others with whom we share a lifeworld. He argued, “knowing oneself is grounded in Being-​with”. Self-​knowledge “operates

9 Derrida, Of Spirit, pp. 94 & 129. 10 Derrida, Of Spirit, p. 107.

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proximally in accordance with the kind of Being which is closest to us –​Being-​ in-​the-​world as Being-​with; and it does so by an acquaintance with that which Dasein, along with the Others, comes across in its environmental circumspection”.11 Heidegger’s others appear in their proximity to our being. They are those who through their relations with us help to create our world. For Heidegger, moreover, our ethical relationship with these others arises out of this proximity. “The Other is proximally disclosed”, he explained, “in concernful solicitude”, where “solicitous concern is understood in terms of what we are concerned with”.12 Derrida argued that because Heidegger’s existential concept of the other relies on proximity, it evokes particular identities or enterprises, thus raising the specter of racism. According to Derrida, the concept of the Other should exceed that found in Heidegger. Although we have our being only in common with those others with whom we share a lifeworld, there is an Other that comes “before” our existential relationship to these others. For Derrida, the presence of existential others always entails an absent Other. Even as we recognize the importance of others in constructing our lifeworld, so we inevitably come across the Other who is outside this lifeworld. When Heidegger forgot this Other, he adopted a metaphysical standpoint and got entangled with spiritual racism. Derrida thus suggested that we supplement a solicitous concern for others with an open hospitality to the Other. His concept of the Other points to a responsibility prior to any ethic based on a shared identity or common enterprise. 1.4 Hospitality and “Spirit” Is there a non-​metaphysical thinking that avoids spiritual as well as biological racism? Derrida argued that Heidegger’s metaphysical concept of spirit is intimately connected with his spiritual racism. Yet Derrida also argued that after 1945 Heidegger moved away from the metaphysical concept of spirit towards a non-​metaphysical one of “spirit”. Even in the Introduction to Metaphysics, Heidegger argued that the question is prior to any metaphysics because a metaphysical position involves not only an orientation to the question but also a posing of a question. This argument evoked an idea of spirit as an original “yes” that precedes the question of Being. It suggested that there is an ethical moment of freedom and responsibility prior to the possibility of questioning. At that time, however, Heidegger’s entanglement with a metaphysical concept 11

M. Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson (London: scm Press, 1962), p. 161. 12 Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 161.

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of spirit led him to a spiritual racism, not to sustained discussion of these possibilities. Many of Heidegger’s later works, such as “The Question Concerning Technology”, also seem to give priority to questioning or thinking rather than an original “yes”. Yet Derrida highlighted a subtle shift, particularly in the 1953 study of Trakl, which took Heidegger from questioning to listening to the promise of language.13 Derrida argued that in this late work Heidegger no longer presented spirit and the pursuit of the question of Being as the first thing. Instead Heidegger suggested that even posing the question of Being assumes language as given. Heidegger came to emphasize the importance of listening to the pledge of language. Derrida suggested that Heidegger thereby opened an ethical space in relation to language prior to the question of Being. Ethics enters into thinking at the very moment thinking begins. The possibility of the question, ontology, and philosophy presupposes language and so a responsibility to the Other. As Derrida put it, the question “answers in advance” to a “pledge”; “it is engaged by it [this pledge] in a responsibility it has not chosen and which assigns it even its liberty”.14 According to Derrida, Heidegger eventually put ethics before ontology. Further, Heidegger’s recognition of an original “yes” points to a non-​metaphysical thinking of “spirit”. Derrida discussed this non-​metaphysical concept of “spirit” partly through an imaginary dialogue between Heidegger and some Christian theologians. The theologians press Heidegger on the similarities between his originary understanding of “spirit” and a radical Christian metaphysics. Derrida had Heidegger reply: “Geist is not first of all this, that, or the other”: It is indeed not a new content. But access to thought, the thinking access to the possibility of metaphysics or pneumato-​spiritualist religions opens onto something quite other than what the possibility makes possible. It opens on to what remains origin-​heterogeneous. What you represent as a simply ontological and transcendental replica is quite other. This is why, without opposing myself to that of which I am trying to think the most matutinal possibility, without even using words other than those of the tradition, I follow the path of a repetition which crosses the path of the entirely other. The entirely other announces itself in the most rigorous

13

M. Heidegger, “Language in the Poem: A Discussion on Georg Trakl’s Poetic Work”, in On the Way to Language (New York: Harper & Row, 1971). 14 Derrida, Of Spirit, p. 130.

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repetition. And this repetition is also the most vertiginous and the most abyssal.15 “Spirit” is first of all the mark of an absent heterogeneity that is problematically forced to become a homogenous presence in metaphysical thinking. Derrida depicted Heidegger as wanting to insist on the importance of remaining open to heterogeneity even as one gets entangled with metaphysics. Even while we continue to use the word spirit, we should recognize our responsibility to the absent Other outside of any ontological designation of the word. 1.5 “Spirit” and Cosmopolitanism It is worth pausing to clarify why a commitment to non-​metaphysical thinking leads to a universal cosmopolitanism. Postmodernism is often associated with rejection of cosmopolitanism. Postmodernists imply that all identities are defined in opposition to excluded others, so all identities are inherently particular. They suggest that all cultures are based on identities and characteristics that define their members in contrast to others, so cosmopolitanism is a conceptual muddle; there can be no identity or culture without an excluded other. Some postmodernists have suggested that universal cosmopolitanisms are not only conceptually muddled but also illegitimate imperialisms. They believe that any cosmopolitan claim is just a specific culture asserting itself as universal and denying the reasonableness and existence of other cultures. In contrast to such postmodernism, I have used Derrida’s Of Spirit to argue that postfoundationalism leads to a universal cosmopolitanism. Postfoundationalism points towards cosmopolitanism because it challenges the reification of collective identities and cultures. In the chapter on subjectivity, I suggested that postfoundationalism implies that individuals forge their identities only in dialogue with others. Individual identities are necessarily relational. People are necessarily embedded in social contexts from which they inherit initial webs of beliefs against the background of which they can go on to remake themselves through their agency. Nonetheless, the relational character of individual identities need not apply to group identities. Besides, there is no reason to assume that the relevant relation must be one of antagonism and exclusion rather than friendship and inclusion. Individuals can come to hold beliefs only through a process of socialization involving interactions with others who are external to them, but these interactions could lead to solidarity. An individual could come to identify with a group through interactions with 15 Derrida, Of Spirit, pp. 112–​3.

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others who also identify with that collectivity. The others must be external to the individual, but they need not be external to the group. To reject cosmopolitanism as conceptually confused is falsely to treat group identities as conceptually equivalent to individual ones. It is to reify groups. Derrida’s Of Spirit shows how postfoundationalism undermines the reification of identities and cultures thereby lending support to cosmopolitanism. The argument is straightforward: recognition of difference undermines the reification of identities and cultures, implying that we cannot draw boundaries around particular cultural groups, so ethical concepts such as hospitality and friendship inherently extend out to a universal cosmopolitanism. To begin, to appeal to difference is to challenge reified accounts of cultures. Derrida argued that Heidegger reified the German Volk. When Heidegger identified spirit with particular content, he fell into metaphysics, forgot to remain open to the question, and neglected difference. In addition, to reject reified accounts of cultures is to undermine the distinction between insiders and outsiders. Some insiders have characteristics associated with outsiders, and some outsiders have properties associated with insiders. Derrida argued that Heidegger recognized in his late writings that heterogeneity exists at the origin of concepts; any reified identity already contains traces of the other it postulates as absent. Finally, because particular cultural groups do not have clear boundaries, any attempt to identify a group inevitably reaches out towards cosmopolitanism. To challenge the reification of identities and cultures is to show that they need not presuppose excluded others. On the contrary, because there is no boundary between those who have and do not have a particular identity or between those who are inside and outside a particular cultural group, therefore, any attempt to specify the group to which people owe hospitality involves extending that hospitality to all. My postfoundational historicism and humanism can inspire a similar argument for a universal cosmopolitanism. I follow Derrida in arguing that difference undermines reified accounts of identities and cultures, so any attempt to specify a group to which we owe a responsibility inherently reaches out to all people. I just motivate my appeal to difference by the idea of situated agency rather than Derrida’s quasi-​structural analysis of language. Situated agency challenges reified accounts of identities and cultures. Consider claims that the self is constituted by a particular culture; for example, that religion is integral to Muslim identity or that gender defines interests shared by all women. My idea of situated agency points to the possibility of decentering these reified identities to recover the multiple, complex, and changing identities of Muslims and women. Also consider claims that cultures are constituted by certain beliefs and practices; for example, that Christians have to accept certain doctrines

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or that men have to be heterosexual. My emphasis on situated agency points to the possibility of decentering these reified cultures to show the multiple, complex, and changing beliefs and practices of Christians, men, or Germans. Any attempt to reify a culture involves the metaphysics and spiritual racism that Derrida identified in Heidegger. To reify a culture is to force differences that arise from situated agency into a myth of sameness. It is to collapse the ethical Other into the existential other. To respect agency and difference is to acknowledge the impossibility of drawing a boundary around a particular group to whom we owe hospitality. 1.6 Cosmopolitanism and “Cosmopolitanism” Derrida has been read as arguing that any universal cosmopolitanism inherently excludes others, but he did not. On the contrary, he argued that to claim some group is excluded is inevitably to reify it in a metaphysical gesture. He concluded that any non-​metaphysical ethic must avoid reification and move towards cosmopolitanism. This cosmopolitanism is a responsibility to the Other that arises from the non-​metaphysical thinking that led him to put concepts under erasure. This “cosmopolitanism” differs from cosmopolitanism, as most postfoundational universalisms do from liberal universalisms. Derrida’s “cosmopolitanism” differs from liberal universalism in rejecting metaphysics of presence with their logic of the same. In Of Spirit Derrida argued that when liberal universalism depends on metaphysics, it comes dangerously close to the metaphysical concept of spirit that informed Heidegger’s racism. In other works, Derrida explored the differences between the liberal concern with rules and rights and his belief in an open hospitality and a democracy to come.16 Liberal universalism typically remains wedded to an analysis of the individual as autonomous. In contrast, postfoundationalists typically echo Heidegger in arguing that our being is a being with others. If postfoundationalists are humanists who believe in situated agency, they might argue that people can have a relation to self only through relations to others. If they are more indebted to structuralism, they might reject even agency, arguing that people cannot have any real relation to self. Thus, as Heidegger argued that the presence of the other is necessary for questioning, so Derrida relied on the presence of the Other to generate an ethics prior to ontology. Derrida suggested that responsibility is “assigned to us by the Other, from the Other, before any hope of reappropriation permits us to assume this responsibility in the space of what could be called autonomy”.17 In this sense, he continued, we share with others an “absolute past” 16 17

J. Derrida, “The Politics of Friendship”, Journal of Philosophy 11 (1988), 632–​44. Derrida, “Politics of Friendship”, 634.

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that brings us “together in a sort of minimal community”.18 Where Derrida differed from Heidegger was in denying that a particular identity, shared mission, or other presence can act as the basis of this minimal community. Because any “we” “tries its luck” in a culture that is not “homogenous”, “our principal concern will be to recognise the major marks of a tension within it, perhaps even ruptures, in any case, scansions”.19 Because liberals typically remain wedded to individualism, liberal universalism generally consists of a vision of how individuals should come together. Liberals often postulate a set of rights that individuals acquire by virtue of entering and being part of society. Alternatively, they postulate norms on which all reasonable individuals should agree. Liberal universalism concerns the rights of individuals in a society that is formed by individuals in pursuit of specific ends, such as peace, order, and social justice. In contrast, Derrida’s “cosmopolitanism” begins by recognizing that individuals have their being only in relation to one another. It consists less of agreed rights than a reminder of the ethical responsibilities that follow from being with others. Again, it consists less of an artificial consensus about rights than openness to difference –​ the gift of friendship to the Other. Liberal universalism typically poses as a neutral position on which all reasonable people can agree. It bases its ethic on an identity defined by a neutral position. As such, liberal universalism effectively reifies a cosmopolitan identity in much the same way as Heidegger did the Volk. Liberal universalism is insufficiently attune to difference. It does not allow for people who do not share the allegedly neutral position on which it is based. Again, either liberal universalism is imperialistic in that it includes the Other in a consensus to which it does not belong or it is exclusionary in that it dismisses the Other as unreasonable. The scare quotes around “cosmopolitanism” admit to non-​neutrality and so an undecidable moment in ethics. Although we should respect “cosmopolitanism”, and although at any given moment we must give some content to it, we always should respect the element of chance embedded in this content. A postfoundational universalism is defiantly provisional. It welcomes the call to interrogate our norms in the name of the Other. Because liberals neglect the undecided nature of cosmopolitanism, they are too quick to tie it down to a particular content. “Cosmopolitanism”, in contrast, evokes a minimal community located in an absolute past conceived as “pure passivity preceding liberty”.20 This community comes before legal obligations 18 19 20

Derrida, “Politics of Friendship”, 636. Derrida, “Politics of Friendship”, 634–​5. Derrida, “Politics of Friendship”, 636.

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and rights. It requires of us less an acceptance of moral rules than a type of ethical conduct. It calls us to a practice of friendship that “maintains the absolute singularity of the Other” even as it “passes through the universality of the law”.21 We should offer a generous hospitality to the Other whom liberals dismiss as unreasonable. We should keep a place open for the Other whom liberals dismiss as absent. 2

Excursus on Normativity

A postfoundational universalism that renounces autonomy and neutrality may appear to be doomed to a form of nihilism according to which we have no valid grounds for insisting on any ethical theory. How can we decide between competing accounts of human flourishing if not by reference to something like autonomy? How can we decide between different ethical theories if not by reference to a position that is formally neutral among them? Postfoundationalism undercuts the standard procedures by which moral philosophers justify universalism. Universalists often appeal to a neutral position that all reasonable people are meant to accept irrespective of the context. The justification and the reasonableness of their ethic allegedly do not depend on a particular web of beliefs. In contrast, because postfoundationalists reject pure reason, they cannot properly appeal to a position or set of rules whose reasonableness is given independently of all particular contexts. Postfoundationalism suggests that ethical claims that are reasonable and even objective in one context may not be so in another. Critics worry that postfoundationalism thus renders incoherent all ethical theories and judgments. The charge of nihilism implies that postfoundationalism undermines all sources of normativity. Critics suggest that postfoundationalism leaves no way of justifying any ethical proposition. Of course, postfoundationalism precludes any claim for the absolute certainty of a normative claim. Nothing is given by pure experience or pure reason, so no proposition is absolutely certain. The content and validity of a proposition depends on a wider web of beliefs. Yet, as I argued in the chapter on knowledge, postfoundationalists can reject truth as absolute certainty and still defend other analyses of objectivity. There is no need to equate justified knowledge with certain truth. On the contrary, well known problems confront any attempt to make truth a necessary condition of justified belief. In particular, to make justification depend on truth is to imply 21

Derrida, “Politics of Friendship”, 640–​1.

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that people cannot have any justification for believing a false proposition even if all available evidence supports that proposition. Once postfoundationalists divorce justification from truth, they can reject pure experience and pure reason while still arguing that people can have valid grounds for normative beliefs. Postfoundationalists can avoid nihilism, therefore, by arguing that there can be provisional justifications for accepting normative claims. As they can analyze objective knowledge as the best account of the world currently available, so they might justify a normative theory on the grounds that it is, for example, more accurate, comprehensive, and consistent than its rivals. Unfortunately, however, my analysis of objective knowledge does not suffice to rebut all concerns about nihilism. The problem of nihilism is arguably not about how to justify beliefs in the absence of absolutely certain truth. The problem is, rather, about what sources of normativity remain available after the death of God. The end of metaphysics implies that ethics, like all knowledge, is a product of human activity. But where much knowledge is indirectly or directly about the world, the death of God raises questions of what exactly ethics is about. If ethics were merely about the norms people hold and the ways these norms operate, it would be an empirical subject, not a normative one. Critique would then cover all there is to say about ethics, for there would be no basis for normativity. In contrast, if ethics is a normative subject concerned with what people ought to do, the question remains: where does this normativity come from? The question of the sources of normativity arises because ethical beliefs have a different relationship to the world than do empirical beliefs. People want their empirical beliefs to correspond to the world, but they want the world to correspond to their ethical beliefs. Although philosophers have suggested that ethical beliefs correspond to a kind of divine or transcendental world, the possibility of any such world vanishes with the death of God. The end of metaphysics leaves people confronting a nihilism associated with the absence of any world to which their ethical beliefs obviously seek to correspond. Normative claims may lack any source in any independent reality. Morality may be a fiction that we create but which we have no reason to accept. Perhaps there is no world to which normative claims refer. Perhaps there is no source from which they legitimately may derive. Nihilism here poses both a general question and a more particular about the extension of my postfoundational analysis of knowledge to normative theorizing. At a general level, the question is: why should people bother with ethics? At the particular level, the question is: how can people make meaningful comparisons between normative theories if these theories have no significant empirical content?

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Why should people bother with ethics? People have to have empirical beliefs about the nature of the world in order to act. To do the grocery shopping, people have to believe that a shop sells food, that they can get to the shop by a given route, and that the shop accepts a form of payment. In contrast, there is no corresponding necessity about having ethical beliefs. Someone might keep going, live their life, survive, and get things done without holding any beliefs about how people ought to act or how the world ought to be. Critics might suggest that to act people must have purposes and so beliefs about what they ought to do; to do the grocery shopping is to have a belief or desire related to fruit and vegetables. In a sense, these critics are right. But they are right only if they deprive the concept of “ought” of its normative connotations. They are right only if the relevant beliefs and desires need not be ethical ones; people might go shopping to get candy because they have a desire for sugar without believing that candy is a normative good for them or for others. Actions involve purposes but purposes need not entail normative beliefs. Derrida, almost alone among postmodernists, tried to explain why people should bother with ethics. As I have just shown, Derrida argued against Heidegger that language creates a responsibility to the Other prior to any positive concept of Being. Elsewhere Derrida explained that “we are invested with an undeniable responsibility at the moment we begin to signify something”, and “this responsibility assigns us our freedom” –​“it is assigned to us by the Other”.22 Derrida thereby suggested that the quasi-​structural nature of language is the source of a normative responsibility to the Other. He argued that even before people develop an allegiance to a particular group, language places them in an ethical relationship to the Other. Language plays two different roles in Derrida’s ethics. In the first place, Derrida associated language with an anti-​essentialism that inspires a concern with difference and so a “cosmopolitanism” based on hostility to reified concepts of culture and spirit. I have argued that postfoundational humanists can appeal to situated agency to defend a similar “cosmopolitanism”. Humanists can argue that the instability of language arises precisely because humans are situated agents who can use language creatively. Language does not resemble a set of nuts and bolts with the size and shape of each unit being fixed and with people picking out the appropriate units for various tasks. Words and propositions are indeterminate. People deploy, redesign, and invent them for their particular purposes in particular circumstances. Human agency produces difference, undermining all reified concepts of spirit. In the second place, Derrida 22

Derrida, “Politics of Friendship”, 634.

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used the term “language” to point to a source of responsibility in a promise to the Other. Postfoundational historicists should be wary of this quasi-​metaphysical role for language. They thus need a different analysis of normativity. Derrida suggested that language, with its promise and faith, is the source of normativity. A literal version of his claim would involve appealing to a reified, even mystical concept of language. It would require a belief that language exists apart from its use by agents and that it itself acts as a source of ethics. Here Derrida’s quasi-​metaphysics of absence echoed negative theology, drifting towards a devotion to language conceived as having an almost divine existence independent of living beings. Alternatively, we might treat Derrida’s claim less literally. Perhaps he appealed to language only to capture the inherently situated nature of agency. In this view, Derrida’s claim is only that people are embedded in social relations that act as a source of normativity. I would agree that people are necessarily embedded in social relations. However, I cannot see how these relations act as a source of a normativity that requires us to bother with ethics. If the claim is simply that social relations require us to take note of others, it is a tautology. But we can take note of others without holding any ethical beliefs. We can act towards others without committing ourselves to any belief about the normative worth of our actions either for us or for anyone else. Why should we not do without ethics in much the same way as some people do without religion? Derrida relied here on a slight of hand that is widespread among current moralists. He made ethics coextensive with action only by dissolving its inherent relationship to normativity. The slight of hand is analogous to making religion a necessary part of life by dissolving its relationship to the supernatural and sacred and defining it as coextensive with a belief in the importance and significance of anything whatsoever. Although I cannot accept Derrida’s idea that language is a source of normativity, I do not have a clear alternative source. Instead I want to suggest that postfoundationalists can motivate ethics even if they do not believe that people necessarily have to bother with ethics. Postfoundationalists can say that there is no compelling necessity to discuss ethics but that if we discuss ethics we can distinguish better and worse moral theories. People could live without making any kind of normative commitment. They could act solely on non-​normative desires and beliefs. Further, if they did, their worldview would not be, in a straightforward way, wrong. To that extent, the death of God can appear to lead to a kind of nihilism. Equally, however, people can hold ethical beliefs. They can try to live in accord with these beliefs at least some of the time. Further, their ethical beliefs can be more or less reasonable. To that extent, the death of God need not lead to anything like nihilism. A critic might argue that my position is analogous to saying we do not need to have believe in God, but

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we can if we like, and if we do, our religious beliefs can be more or less sensible. But the analogy does not hold. If there is no God, it is a mistake to ask what God is like, whereas even if we act independently of normative considerations, it is not necessarily a mistake to ask how we ought to act. Talk about ethics is voluntary but not intrinsically mistaken. If we do decide to talk about ethics, we still confront a more particular aspect of nihilism. How can we compare normative theories if they have no significant empirical content? I have argued that objective knowledge comes from comparing webs of beliefs using criteria such as: how well they fit the facts, the number and range of facts they fit, and how many hypotheses they generate. These comparisons rely on the relation of competing theories to shared facts, where facts are exemplary perceptions. Although no fact is simply given, when people disagree about something, they still usually agree on a number of propositions that describe what they consider to be exemplary perceptions, so they can try to adjudicate their disagreement in terms of these agreed facts. Yet when they disagree about ethical matters, they cannot appeal to shared facts because normative theories have no significant empirical content. Facts might constrain the normative positions that they can adopt, for “ought” implies “can” and people’s ethic should at least be compatible with their other knowledge. But empirical facts cannot help decide among ethical theories that are consistent with their other beliefs. Clearly I need to modify my analysis of comparisons among theories if I am to apply it to ethics. Comparisons among normative theories can appeal to shared intuitions in place of facts. When people agree about a moral intuition, that intuition has something like the status of a fact for them. Their agreement on the intuition means it can act as evidence to which they can appeal when debating issues on which they disagree. In this sense, moral intuitions play a role in ethical debates analogous to that played by agreed facts in other debates. Objective ethical theories arise from comparing and criticizing rival views in terms of shared intuitions. Rival theories try to account for intuitions being as they are. Even if people’s intuitions reflect the theories they hold, shared intuitions provide a basis for a type of criticism that prevents the process of comparison from being purely circular. Criticism means that theories do not decide which intuitions they encounter. Critics of a theory can point to intuitions that its proponents have not considered or that it does not seem to fit. They can ask that the theory account for those intuitions. Nonetheless, moral intuitions do not possess the same epistemic security as do empirical facts. Ethical knowledge is thus inherently more suspect than knowledge about the world. When skeptics question our confidence in shared facts, we can reply that these facts are exemplary perceptions and our ability

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to get by in the world broadly guarantees the reliability of our perceptual faculties. Although no particular fact is given to us as a pure perception, we have good reason to trust the general quality of our perceptions. Our ability to survive in the world gives us a reason to assume that our vision, hearing, smell, taste, and touch are reasonable guides. In contrast, we have no reason to trust the general quality of moral intuitions. We might get by in the world without such intuitions or with poor intuitions. Perhaps moralists will argue that moral intuitions can give us a broad guarantee due to their place in the evolution of human societies. Moralists might argue that we have good reason to trust our intuitive faculty because it is the source of the norms that have enabled us to survive within social groups. Even if we accept this argument, and I remain unconvinced, it still would not give our moral intuitions the epistemic security of facts. The intuitions still would not correspond to objects and events in the world. It seems, therefore, that we should be more skeptical of ethical knowledge than of knowledge of the world. Skepticism about ethical knowledge lends special pertinence to genealogy. There is always a danger that comparisons between theories rest on mistaken facts or intuitions. The danger is greater with ethical knowledge because intuitions are less secure than facts. Obviously if people know their intuitions are mistaken, they should not appeal to them. The issue is, therefore, not how to determine the truth of facts or intuitions –​as if there were some given to which we had access and by reference to which we could determine their adequacy. The issue is, rather, how to loosen the hold of intuitions and theories so as to evaluate them afresh, test them, and think of other ways of evaluating and testing them. Genealogy is a crucial way of doing just this. Genealogy provides a way of exploring plausible narratives about the sources of moral intuitions. It allows people to examine the possibility that their intuitions have disgraceful origins and so should not be trusted as guides to comparisons among ethical theories. As the epistemic security of shared facts arises in part from their origin in perceptual apparatuses we trust, so moral intuitions gain epistemic authority from being subject to genealogical inquiries into their origins. 3

Conclusion

Universalism refers to the idea that moral values are universally applicable rather than applicable only to particular cultures. Almost any moral claim might take a pseudo-​universal form; we can say “X should always be the case given the conditions A, B, and C”. Yet universalism assumes more distinctly that the conditions under which moral values apply do not include that people

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have a particular identity or belong to a particular culture. Universalism brings together three overlapping ideas. Universalism includes, first, the cosmopolitan idea that everyone belongs to a common humanity governed by a shared morality. Even if this shared morality allows different states or groups to do some things differently, it treats all those states and groups as part of a cosmopolitan order that falls under a shared set of norms, including those that allow different groups to do things differently. Arguably, universalism thus includes, secondly, the idea that the individual, not the group, is the unit of moral concern. Individuals are entitled to equal consideration by virtue of belonging to the cosmopolitan order. Even if special rights and duties exist among members of particular groups, there is a larger set of moral norms that apply to everyone irrespective of citizenship and other affiliations. Universalism thus overlaps, finally, with the idea that the justification of ethical values should not be relative to any particular group or culture. In this chapter, I have indicated how postfoundationalists can defend a version of each of the three components of universalism. For a start, I tracked Derrida’s argument against reifying cultures, showing how it points to a universal cosmopolitanism. It is often thought that a postfoundational emphasis on difference precludes appeals to overarching communities or narratives. But postfoundationalists should decenter local narratives as well as grand ones. When they do, they challenge reified groups and communities, and they undermine particularistic moral visions. Postfoundationalism implies that cultures do not have clear boundaries and that individuals are neither determined nor limited by the identities currently found in a society. Derrida’s concept of “supplementarity” and Lyotard’s of the “differend” suggest that language is not a self-​determining structure but rather a set of elements incorporating a necessary instability and uncertainty. Instability and uncertainty give rise to differences that preclude our delimiting particular identities, groups, or communities. Still, to argue that particular cultures should not constitute the ultimate unit of moral concern is not to show that the individual should do so. Hostility to humanism might preclude some postmodernists from ascribing moral significance to the individual. Derrida located the source of moral responsibility to the Other not in the creative agency of the individual but in language as a kind of quasi-​structure. In contrast, my defense of situated agency provides grounds for focusing on the different individual as the unit of concern. When postfoundationalists reject Derrida’s mystical invocation of language, they raise question of how to motivate normativity. I argued that although people are not compelled to hold ethical beliefs, there is nothing mistaken about doing so. Further, if people hold ethical beliefs, they can debate the rival merits of different beliefs by comparing them in the context of shared

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intuitions, although they should be skeptical of these intuitions and explore their vulnerability to genealogical critique. My postfoundational universalism differs from a liberal universalism based on a belief in autonomy and neutrality. Postfoundationalism allows for points of agreement, but these agreements arise in particular contexts and so are unstable. Philosophers cannot specify points of agreement that are bound to emerge nor, therefore, the outcome to debates. Postfoundationalists recognize the unstable, constructed, and provisional nature of moral knowledge and the intuitions by reference to which we justify such knowledge. The universal does not exist as a given that people discover using reason and intuition. It is something that people construct provisionally through their interactions. Indeed, the universal has neither monolithic nor final content. Several theories may appear more or less equally justified, and other theories could later come to replace these. In the next chapter, I explore the implications of this rejection of neutrality and autonomy for the analysis of community and democracy.

chapter 10

On Community Modern thought has produced dilemmas of knowledge and subjectivity. Postmodernists characteristically respond to these dilemmas in ways that draw on structuralist and avant-​garde traditions. I favor alternative responses associated with postfoundational historicism and humanism. In ethics, the dilemmas of knowledge and subjectivity reappear as those of justifying normative theories and imagining freedom and community. Many postmodernists did not write about the problem of justification. When Jacques Derrida addressed it, he relied on a quasi-​structural approach to language to motivate a universal cosmopolitanism. In the last chapter, I argued for a similar universal cosmopolitanism, but I grounded it in concrete historical activity. To justify normativity and its universal scope is, however, not to say much about the substantive content of ethics. What content should postfoundationalists give universal cosmopolitanism? Derrida’s quasi-​metaphysical appeals to a quasi-​structural language meant that he wrote little about substantive ethical issues. He argued that the nature of language sets up a responsibility to the Other and yet speech and action necessarily neglects this responsibility. In his view, to use language or to decide on an action is to entangle oneself in metaphysics. As speech and thought necessarily gesture at stable meanings, so ethical decisions necessarily privilege an existential other at the expense of the Other. Signification and action necessarily impose homogeneity at the expense of différance. Thus, Derrida did not provide an alternative to metaphysics so much as work within it and against it to disrupt it. Instead of offering an alternative ethic, he explored the difficulties and dangers of doing so. He defended an unconditional responsibility to the Other without giving substantive content to that responsibility. He argued that justice is possible only as an experience of the impossible, for any attempt to give it content would be untrue to it. Justice is always to come, and during the perpetual wait for justice, deconstructive questioning interrogates all substantive ethics and remind people of their responsibility to the Other. By rejecting Derrida’s quasi-​metaphysics for postfoundational historicism and humanism, I reopen substantive questions such as: What freedom can people aspire to? The postmodern radicals characteristically approached the dilemma of freedom in ways that drew on the avant-​garde. They appealed to avant-​garde sites, including the body and desire, and they defended avant-​garde strategies, including play, aesthetic self-​creation, excess, and transgression. As

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the avant-​garde had adopted these sites and strategies to resist the totalizing and recuperative powers of bourgeois society, so the postmodern radicals focused on resisting imprisonment in a false social whole. Jean Baudrillard called on people to push the ruling code into its own “hyperlogic”, breaking up the system and liberating otherness.1 Michel Foucault defended an aesthetic relation to self in which people affirm their liberty by devising personal styles opposed to all ruling norms.2 The postmodern radicals differed from one another: for example, Baudrillard and Jean-​Francois Lyotard took almost opposite views of the impact of new technologies on the possibility of the personal liberation. Still, despite these differences, they shared a concern to defend individuals from normalizing power, and they evoked avant-​garde sites and strategies as routes to something like freedom. In the historical chapters I suggested that postmodernists have little reason to adopt avant-​garde sites and strategies given their rejection of the real. The point of the sites and strategies was to provide people with a glimpse of an unalienated reality unaffected by bourgeois power. When the postmodernists argued that power was unavoidable –​that subjectivity necessarily was socially constructed –​they gave up the idea of an unalienated reality. As a result, the purpose of the old avant-​garde sites and strategies becomes unclear. Given there is no escaping power, the point of those sites and strategies cannot be to escape power. On the contrary, those sites and strategies may themselves be the constructions of an avant-​garde discourse. To tell people to adopt those sites and strategies may be to try to impose avant-​garde norms and an avant-​ garde regime of power. In this chapter, therefore, I want to use the humanist idea of situated agency to reconsider the ethical implications of postfoundationalism. On the one hand, I will begin by arguing that situated agency means that the individual comes into being in community. As society and social power necessarily influence individuals, they are not alien forces so much as unavoidable contexts. People can exist and thrive only in fellowship with others. Community and fellowship then provide grounds for an ethic of collective welfare and empowerment. On the other hand, however, I will go on to argue that a proper recognition of agency undermines reified views of community. As I argued in the last chapter, the community moves out towards cosmopolitanism. A postfoundational emphasis on difference reminds people that communities do not embody 1 J. Baudrillard, In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities; or, the End of the Social and Other Essays (New York: Semiotext[e]‌, 1983), p. 46. 2 M. Foucault, “An Aesthetics of Existence”, in Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and Other Writings, 1977–​1984, ed. L. Kritzman (London: Routledge, 1988), p. 47–​56.

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fixed identities. Avant-​garde sites and strategies might serve less to promote an aesthetic individualism against the claims of community and more to promote an open community. Finally, I highlight the role of democratic organizations in making legitimate decisions within an open community. 1

The Community of Fellows

The postmodernists’ hostility to unities and totalities inspired an aesthetic individualism. They denounced community as hostile to difference and diversity. Where the avant-​garde had hoped that a future society might be real and harmonious, the postmodernists did not. Instead the postmodernists depicted society as inevitably tied to the illegitimate imposition of normalizing power on people. They suggested that the avant-​garde’s use of teleology and metaphors of depth encouraged binary logics and promoted hierarchy, inequality, and injustice. Baudrillard, Foucault, and Lyotard rejected the possibility that individuals might find freedom in any society. When Baudrillard asked “what solution is there?”, he replied “we can only remember that seduction resides in the safeguarding of alienness, in non-​reconciliation”.3 The postmodernists pitted the individual against society and its norms. They turned their backs on the ideas of community and fellowship associated with social democratic ideals of equality, welfare, and empowerment. One commentator even inferred, “there is no conceivable way a realistic Left program could be patched together out of postmodernist theory”.4 Yet I believe that postfoundationalism leads to a defense of community as the site of freedom. Postfoundationalists should fill out their universal cosmopolitanism with ideas of community, equality, welfare, and empowerment. Crucially, as I argued in the chapter on subjectivity, postfoundationalism precludes the idea that individuals come before the community. The postfoundational rejection of given truths implies that community is necessary to the individual’s existence. Because individuals cannot have pure experiences nor exercise a pure reason, they necessarily reason and have experiences against a background of prior theories. People cannot come to hold beliefs and so to perform actions except against the background of initial beliefs that they gain as tradition from the community. Postfoundationalism leads, therefore, to a thick analysis of the self. Individuals are necessarily embedded in community.

3 J. Baudrillard, The Perfect Crime (London: Verso, 1997), p. 129. 4 Z. Bauman, “The Left as the Counter-​Culture of Modernity”, Telos 70 (1987), 86.

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Postfoundationalism implies that individuals come to hold beliefs and perform actions only in a context of traditions made available to them by the community. This thick analysis of the self does not imply only that as a contingent fact people are born into particular contexts that influence them. It implies that the very idea of a person is of an embedded self. It undermines the idea, often equated with liberal individualism, of the autonomous individual. There cannot be a temporal or conceptual space where individuals exist outside community, no state of nature, no pure reason, no existential freedom, and no place behind a veil of ignorance. The postfoundational rejection of given truths entails a thick embedded analysis of the self as opposed to a thin atomized one. Although the postmodernists did not defend a thick analysis of the self, their critique of the subject pointed in that direction. They rejected not only autonomy but arguably also the modest idea of agency. Lyotard opposed the idea that individuals “make use of language like a toolbox” to express their intentions. He preferred to say that “the so-​called players were on the contrary situated by phrases in the universes those phrases ‘present’ before any intention”.5 Foucault similarly argued that the idea of the author is redundant because authors merely follow discursive practices.6 Here the postmodernists adopt a thick analysis of the self –​an analysis so thick they portray the subject as a mere product of social forces. However, although their literary and social theories expressed hostility to the subject, when they turned to ethics, they often adopted an aesthetic individualism that ignored the obvious implications of their own critiques of the subject. Because postfoundationalism entails an embedded analysis of the self, it can support a social democratic ethic of fellowship. The situated nature of agency means that humans are interdependent. People provide one another with the background and context in which each has their individual existence. The life of the individual is a common one, lived with others. People can attain freedom, the good life, or whatever end one invokes only alongside others in community. Nobody can be free or pursue the good by themselves. Because people necessarily pursue the good with others, they are bound to these others in fellowship. The community of fellows is the ethical expression of human interdependence. It differs, therefore, from specific organizations based on combination. Organizations arise when people combine for particular purposes. Although 5 J-​F. Lyotard, “Interview”, with G. van den Abbeele, Diacritics 14 (1984), 17. 6 M. Foucault, “What is an Author?”, in Language, Counter-​Memory, Practice, trans. D. Bouchard and S. Simon (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), pp. 113–​38.

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people can be members of organizations from birth, combination is usually voluntary. Individuals form, join, or remain in an organization because they share something of its purpose. The nature of an organization arises partly, therefore, from the common overlapping purposes of its members. Similarly, the place of a member in an organization arises partly from the role that she plays in the pursuit of its various overlapping purposes. Individuals combine in organizations not because of their existence but because they play specific roles in efforts to get specific ends. In contrast, the community of fellows expresses people’s humanity. People belong to the community because their individuality arises out of their relations to one another. The community of fellows is not established by an act of will for a specific purpose. On the contrary, it is a necessary background to people choosing to establish organizations for specific purposes. Individuals exist in relations of fellowship, and the community they thus form provides the background against which they as individuals choose whether to join with others in organizations. Community is conceptually prior to all organizations. The community could set up an organization. Fellowship could inspire combination. Nonetheless, the community need not appear in any organization, and should it do so, the organization would express it, not constitute it. Individuals exist in fellowship because of their being, and it is this fellowship that binds them in community. Consequently, the community embodies different social and moral relations from those of organizations. Members of organizations can occupy different positions that enable them to fulfill different roles in pursuit of common purposes. The community consists of moral equals. In an organization, individuals can occupy different places and play different roles. In the community, everyone occupies an equivalent place, for the being of each presumes the same relation to the others. Fellowship is thus by its nature a relation of equals rather than of superior and inferior. Fellowship does not imply that people have equal capacities or that they are equally able to fulfill a role in an organization. But it does imply that people are moral equals in the community. My postfoundational analysis of the community of fellows differs from liberal individualism and communitarianism. Clearly it echoes communitarian critiques of liberal individualism for failing to recognize that individuals are inherently embedded. More particularly, it suggests that the characteristic error of liberal individualism is to think of social life solely as combination and organization rather than fellowship and community. Liberal individualists regard individuals as autonomous beings standing outside all social contexts and choosing whether to associate with others. But because individuals can exist only in relation to others, the community of fellows must precede all organizations.

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Unlike many communitarian ethics, however, my analysis of the community of fellows does not appeal to particular identities. Communitarians tie communities to particular identities for two main reasons. First, some communitarians adopt too thick a view of the self. They argue that people rely on communal identities they cannot overturn. In contrast, I argued in the chapter on subjectivity that individuals have the capacity to reflect on their inheritances and to change and transform them for reasons of their own. Second, some communitarians define traditions and communities by reference to core ideas, debates, and philosophical moves. In contrast, I argued in the chapter on the human sciences that situated agency precludes reified accounts of discourses and institutions. In the last chapter I also echoed Derrida in arguing that such reification leads to spiritual racism. Ironically when communitarians define communities by fixed identities, they make a mistake resembling that of liberal individualism. Communitarians reduce social life to combination. They treat all social relations as particular ones formed for specific purposes. They ascribe to the community some features of an organization. So, where communitarians sometimes imply that communities embody a particular way of life or particular set of values, I have argued that when people combine around an identity or for a purpose, they establish an organization, not the community. In this view, communitarians move from a correct recognition of community as expressing people’s interdependence to a mistaken claim that community must take the form of a particular organization. By reifying the community, they treat it as an organization. They present the community as constituted by particular purposes or beliefs shared by a particular group. It is because communitarians sometimes reduce the community to an organization that they, like liberal individualists, search for shared identities and moral consensuses. Organizations embody shared purposes, so if the community took the form of an organization, it could instantiate an identity or consensus. Liberal individualists characteristically postulate a neutral and universal consensus. Some communitarians deny the neutrality of liberal theories only then to postulate fixed identities as constitutive of particular communities and traditions. People necessarily exist as equal fellows in the community, but against the background of the community they can form various organizations with diverse characteristics. The historical character of any given organization usually reflects the purposes and values for which it is created and maintained. Sometimes the purposes and values show little self-​conscious recognition of the ethic of fellowship. Think for example of slave societies, radical patriarchies, and racial apartheids. At other times, however, the relevant purposes

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and values show greater awareness of fellowship. But what are the values required by fellowship in community? Fellowship leads to an ethic of welfare and empowerment. Because people are interdependent in the community, they have a concern for one another’s welfare. As people’s lives entwine, so others’ well-​being should be important to them. People are social beings in that their selves are constituted partly by relations to others. Thus, properly to care for oneself is to care for these relations, and because these relations depend on the welfare of the others, properly to care for oneself is also to care for their welfare. Individuals exist in social relations, and these relations make the well-​being of others a part of their lives. It is possible to rephrase this argument for why people should care for their fellows in terms of self-​interest. The argument then becomes that people’s own good depends on others having a suitable standard of welfare. People can pursue, let alone realize, the good life only in the context of the community, so their good depends on that of others. They can pursue their good only if the other members of the community provide them with a suitable context in which to do so. An individual’s good depends on her fellows having enough material comfort, education, and the like for them to provide a suitable background and context for her activities. Because people are morally equal in the community, they also have a concern for one another’s empowerment. Fellows recognize and treat each other as equal in having ends. The community provides the context in which individuals can pursue specific purposes, possibly alone but often in organizations. To recognize fellows as members of the community is thus to ascribe to them the capacity to pursue specific purposes. As fellows, people should seek to heighten the choices and opportunities available to one another. To some extent, they can do so by promoting the welfare of others; they can try to ensure that their fellows have decent education, health, and income. In addition, they can try to give their fellows a platform from which to speak; they can involve them in decision-​making processes. Fellows should seek to promote the choices open to one another. They should try to empower one another. Postfoundationalism supports an ethic of welfare and empowerment. It also undermines the main arguments raised against social equality and welfare. Crucially, postfoundationalism leads to a communitarian view of the self, which in turn leads to an insistence on the social nature of rights. Because individuals cannot come before the community, there can be no natural or pre-​social rights. Because individuals exist only in social contexts, they can bear rights only against a social background. Thus, all rights are social. The community grants rights to individuals because it believes that certain liberties and powers advance human flourishing. The community creates rights to

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protect what it sees as the interests of its members. Relevant interests might include freedom from certain restraints, access to certain opportunities, or a certain level of welfare. As postfoundationalism offers a social analysis of rights, so it rebuts the main arguments against welfare and empowerment. For a start, postfoundationalists need not defend a right to private property, let alone a full-​blown one. Individuals cannot have a natural right to the products of their labor. Any right people have to property is one given them by the community. Thus, postfoundationalists might defend a limited right to private property as conducive to human flourishing, but they need not think of this right as sacrosanct. In addition, postfoundationalists can place rights associated with social justice on an equal footing with those to political powers and liberties. All rights serve to promote human flourishing. Their relative importance depends on one’s view of human flourishing. Some people might argue that political rights are most important, but others might not. Postfoundationalists might thus reject an emphasis on limited government and private property for one on the need for the state to act to secure social rights and promote equality. Postfoundationalism locates the individual firmly against the background of the community. It promotes a concern to make this background as rich as possible –​rich in terms of fellowship and public spirit, rich in terms of welfare and resources, and rich in terms of empowerment and opportunities. Postfoundationalists should say, with R. H. Tawney, “it is [repulsive] that some classes should be excluded from the heritage of civilisation which others enjoy, and that the fact of human fellowship … should be obscured by economic contrasts”.7 2

The Open Community

As agency is situated, so people are fellows in community. This fellowship does not preclude recognition of the fact and value of agency. The community of fellows avoids appeals to fixed identities. It actively seeks to protect individuals’ capacity for agency from the normalizing effects of prescriptive identities backed by social power. Whether prescribed identities are allegedly universal, as favored by liberals, or specific to groups, as favored by communitarians, they impose a false unity on a pluralist world. Although individuals exist only in community, they are agents who can reject attachments and claims given 7 R. Tawney, Equality (London: Allen & Unwin, 1931), p. 113.

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to them by the community. To some extent the community respects people’s agency precisely by promoting their welfare and empowerment; it gives them the resources they need to develop and express their creative intentionality. In addition, however, the community respects people’s agency by remaining open to difference. Postfoundationalists base the community on agency, not a prescribed identity. Although they do not reject community, they promote an open community based on a fluid and indeterminate identity. Here I want to rewrite postmodern themes so as to pull them away from aesthetic individualism and instead offer an account of a suitably open community. Postmodernists have no justification for clinging to avant-​garde themes given their rejection of the real. The avant-​garde believed that eroticism, self-​creation, and transgression provided ways to find an authentic space or moment apart from bourgeois society. When postmodernists rejected authenticity and the real, they made these avant-​garde sites and strategies pointless. Yet the postmodernists were so disillusioned with the real that they ignored the more limited possibilities that remained available. Their focus on the impossibilities of authenticity and harmony blinded them to situated agency. In contrast, I believe that situated agency provides grounds for appealing to some of the sites and strategies that postmodernists inherited from the avant-​garde. My account of the open community will draw, in particular, on Foucault’s discussions of disciplinary and pastoral power, morality and ethics, and aesthetic self-​creation and transgression. It is important to emphasize, however, that I do not want simply to repeat avant-​garde and postmodern themes. Rather, I want to transform them systematically so that they fit with postfoundational historicism and humanism. Given that individuals are necessarily situated, authenticity must consist not in the vestiges of an unmediated experience but in the possibility of choices based on local reasoning. So, instead of valorizing the immediacy of bodily desire, I will allow that authentic choices come from various intentional states including beliefs. Also, instead of valorizing dandyism and transgression, I will allow that authentic choices can result in adherence to settled ways of life and participation in existing social organizations. An analysis of the open community can begin from its respect for the capacity of agency. The open community treats people as agents who are able to reject all prescribed identities. Yet because people always exist against a social background that influences them, the open community cannot produce autonomy. As Foucault stressed, power is ubiquitous so even the open community cannot avoid power. The ubiquity of power means that its mere presence is no cause for concern. What matters is, rather, the nature of the power that is

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present. The open community should prefer forms of power that recognize and encourage agency to those that try to destroy it. Foucault did not explicitly analyze forms of power by their relation to agency, but he did distinguish between disciplinary and pastoral power. Disciplinary power works on and through people’s bodies. Foucault’s history of police and biopower is one of the constant and unlimited domination of social power over the individual. The rise of police involved apparatuses of security intervening to secure the efficient management of docile bodies, and the rise of biopower extended these interventions to manage populations. So, for example, Foucault’s account of prisons focused almost on the ways in which governors, guards, and other officials dominate prisoners. It ignored the ways in which prisoners are influenced by other aspects of their social background, such as fellow prisoners, let alone the ways in which prisoners make themselves. Foucault explored influence and self-​making only when he later studied pastoral power. Pastoral power arose with the entry into the public sphere of the Christian idea of the shepherd tending the individual conscience through techniques such as confession and self-​examination. Pastoral-​power flows through people’s consciousness as they internalize the laws, rules, and norms by which they then regulate themselves. As Foucault explained, pastoral power “cannot be exercised without knowing the inside of people’s minds, without exploring their souls”.8 Where discipline goes to work on bodies, pastoral power works on consciousness. Where discipline involves the objectivizing of the subject, pastoral power involves people turning themselves into subjects. Postfoundationalists can revise Foucault to distinguish disciplinary power as violence from pastoral power as influence. Violence involves an individual or group denying the agency of the other. It is the attempt to control others without their collusion. Influence is a form of power that recognizes the agency of others. It passes through the consciousness of individuals and in doing so it necessarily allows for their intentionality, creativity, and reasoning. Although violence need not entail physical assault, physical assault is always violence. Further, even when violence does not involve physical assault, it usually goes to work on the body. Others do what the powerful wish not because they so choose but because physical force or the threat of it compels them. Thus, violence characteristically involves domination through order and discipline. Laws and rules are issued, and failure to comply with them is met with

8 M. Foucault, “The Subject and Power”, in H. Dreyfus and P. Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), p. 214.

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beatings and incarcerations. Violence might confront resistance, but it cannot allow resistance, for it works by dominating, by forcing others to conform. In contrast, influence tries to convince others that they want or ought to think or act differently. Influence goes to work on the mind. Others do what the powerful wish because they as agents reflect on arguments and choose to do so. Thus, influence characteristically involves continuous persuasion. People make proposals, and if others do not accept the proposals, they develop arguments to respond to the other’s objections. Where violence treats others as objects to be forced to do something, influence treats them as agents to be convinced of the rightness of doing it. Violence characteristically tries to stifle people’s agency; influence admits and even fosters it. Because the open community values the capacity for agency, it seeks to replace violence with persuasion and influence. As Foucault suggested at the end of his life, postfoundationalists judge societies by an ideal of “a minimum of domination”.9 All societies include aspects of violence. Perhaps they have to give violence a sanctioned role –​although I can see no logical grounds for insisting that they necessarily must do so. Nonetheless, the open community tries to minimize violence. It relies as much as it can on influence. Foucault gestured towards a distinction between power that did or did not recognize agency. He wrote that because pastoral power works by convincing people of the rightness of certain acts, it must treat the other “to the very end as a person who acts”.10 Equally, however, his hostility to humanism and rejection of the real meant that he paid less attention to the advantages of influence over violence than to the way influence mimicked violence in manipulating and normalizing people. He presented pastoral power less as free agency than as a violent attack on consciousness akin to the impact of discipline on the body. In his view, modern power might pass through the consciousness of the individual but the result is not freedom so much as a more efficient and effective system of power. People do not resist pastoral power; they impose it on themselves. Other postmodernists also suggested that in modern society power-​as-​influence is so strong that individuals do not exercise their agency so much as regulate themselves in accord with a conventional morality. The postmodernists’ suspicions about the normalizing effects of modern power even led them to imply that it is more damaging than violence. In this view, whereas violence is at least visible and honest, modern power makes people insipid 9 10

M. Foucault, “The Ethic of Care for the Self as a Practice of Freedom: An Interview”, trans. J. Gauthier, in J. Bernauer and D. Rasmussen, eds., The Final Foucault (Cambridge, MA: mit Press, 1991), p. 18. Foucault, “Subject and Power”, p. 220.

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and uniform while pretending to liberate them. Honest violence may be better than deceitful influence. The open community should guard against influence becoming so strong that people merely normalize themselves and follow conventional morality. A morality should put less emphasis on conventions by which people regulate themselves than on people exercising their agency. Foucault did not explicitly analyze moralities by their relation to agency, but he did distinguish between morality and ethics. Morality refers to sets of rules that specify what individuals should or should not do. Ethics refers to the ways in which individuals conduct themselves towards sets of rules. Foucault broadly identified ethics with Ancient Greece and morality with Hellenic Rome. The Greeks had codes of conduct but their emphasis fell on the personal styles displayed in the creative interpretation of these codes. Ancient Greece provided the individual with considerable freedom towards social norms. Its morality was a flexible setting within which people were free to develop their own ethic of existence and affirm their liberty by giving their life a certain form. Unfortunately, the ethical orientation of the Greeks gave way to the stern morality of Hellenic Rome. Codes came to be more important than conduct and style. The individual lost any real latitude of interpretation over moral rules. Postfoundationalists can revise Foucault’s distinction between morality and ethics to identify types of influence that promote, respectively, normalization and free agency. The open community should extend its reliance on influence over violence to ethical conduct over moral rules. Violence generally involves applying moral rules backed by the threat of punishment. It imposes on people rules that they must obey if they are to avoid punishment. It denies people agency in relation to the morality that governs them. To reduce violence is to limit moral rules. The open community thus strives as far as possible to replace fixed codes with more open-​ended and flexible ideas of ethical conduct. It tries to make sure that power-​as-​influence takes the form of a loose set of norms that get interpreted in conduct. Where moral rules impose requirements and restrictions on people, an ethic is a practice by which people use their agency to negotiate a relationship to requirements and restrictions. An ethic is the personal mode of being by which people interpret and develop laws, rights, and duties. It is not a set of rules but an orientation towards a set of rules. The open community privileges ethical conduct rather than morality. It focuses on the good conceived as a practice rather than the right conceived as the domain of law. Morality and law have a role, but they should remain flexible enough to allow individuals to devise new forms of ethical conduct. This flexibility is not about distinguishing a public realm governed by law from a private realm of ethical conduct. Rather, it insists on the centrality of ethical

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conduct in public as well as private matters. Morality in any sphere represents a set of imposed rules, and when people follow these rules, they generally regulate themselves, rather than exercising their free agency. Agency and freedom appear when people interrogate moral rules to craft a personal ethic. Foucault pointed towards a distinction between systems of norms that did and did not foster agency. He contrasted ethics with morality, arguing that “liberty is the ontological condition of ethics” and “ethics is the deliberate form taken by liberty”.11 Yet even when people have the space in which to exercise their agency in interpreting moral rules, they might reproduce existing forms of pastoral power. Foucault’s debt to the avant-​garde tradition led him to equate ethical conduct with aesthetic self-​creation and transgression.12 Other postmodernists also promoted stylized performances and avant-​garde sites and strategies. They believed that only deliberate, blatant, and even extravagant breaks with conventional norms showed that people had avoided the recuperating effects of bourgeois society. Postfoundational humanists will echo some features of aesthetic self-​creation and transgression while dismissing others. They will accept that ethical conduct involves questioning received identities. Because people are agents but not autonomous beings, their freedom consists not in discovering their true selves but in reflecting on and perhaps rejecting the identities they have inherited. The freedom they attain through ethical conduct is not the impossible liberation of a true self from all social influences. It is the exercise of the capacity to change oneself in the context of particular social influences. Thus, ethical conduct should involve questioning these influences. When individuals recognize the role of tradition in making their identities, these identities appear as contingent. Individuals thus become able to question their inheritances and to explore the borders of the subjectivities that were made available to them. As Foucault suggested, “the undefined work of freedom” consists of separating out “from the contingency that has made us what we are, the possibility of no longer being, doing or thinking what we are, do or think”.13 By redefining aesthetic self-​creation and transgression as the questioning of received identities, postfoundational humanists can avoid what critics

11 12 13

Foucault, “Ethic of Care”, p. 4. M, Foucault, “A Preface to Transgression”, in Language, Counter-​Memory, Practice, pp. 29–​ 52; and M. Foucault, “What is Enlightenment?”, in The Foucault Reader, ed. P. Rabinow (New York: Penguin Books, 1984), pp. 32–​50. Foucault, “What is Enlightenment?”, p. 46.

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deride as the bohemianism and narcissism of Foucault’s ethics.14 These critics argue that Foucault fetishized the aesthetic and transgressive practices of a bohemian elite. Yet there is no need to associate the questioning of received identities with the stylized activities of the avant-​garde. People should question the traditions they inherit so as to open novel possibilities. If the relevant traditions include the avant-​garde one, they might question their continuing adherence to the aesthetic and transgressive practices found in that tradition. The critics also argue that Foucault privileges a narcissistic relation to self over social relations. A focus on questioning received identities also diffuses this criticism. When people interrogate their inheritance, they might decide to join or stand apart from struggles for any collective to which they apparently belong. They might enter social relations to pursue cooperative endeavors, but it matters that they should question the relations and decide whether to cooperate. They might work together for shared ends, but they should do so in accord with identities they have crafted through their conduct, not inherited unquestioningly from others. Far from being a bohemian narcissism, the questioning of received identities involves a friendly and hospitable stance to others. If people think that the community embodies a fixed identity, they often meet those who do not share that identity with hostility. They treat others as enemies to be met with fear and aggression. In contrast, the open community rejects any such fixed identity. People should meet those who fall outside its existing identities with a friendly recognition of their positive role in providing new possibilities. They should remain open to others whose nature they do not yet know. This openness recalls the universal cosmopolitanism that I defended in the last chapter. It resembles what Derrida described as “hospitality without reserve”: Awaiting without horizon of the wait, awaiting what one does not expect yet or any longer, hospitality without reserve, welcoming salutation accorded in advance to the absolute surprise of the arrivant from whom or from which one will not ask anything in return and who or which will not be asked to commit to the domestic contracts of any welcoming power (family, State, nation, territory, native soil or blood, language, culture in general, even humanity), just opening which renounces any right to property, any right in general, messianic opening to what is coming, that is, to the event that cannot be awaited as such, or recognised in

14

J. Habermas, Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1987), partic. pp. 266–​93.

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advance therefore, to the event as the foreigner itself, to her or to him for whom one must leave an empty place, always, in memory of the hope.15 3

Democratic Organization

The community places people in relations of fellowship that imply a concern with others’ welfare and empowerment. The open community treats people as agents, prefers influence to violence, favors ethical conduct over rules, questions existing identities, and remains hospitable to others. Although questions remain about the nature and content of welfare and empowerment and about when to accept violence and rules, these are questions not for philosophical analysis but for democratic organizations. Postmodernists evoked politics and democracy mainly as if they were matters of extraordinary moments and eruptions. They equated politics with the antagonistic struggles that forge and institutionalize stable regimes or that challenge seemingly stable regimes. They neglected politics as the everyday activity of collective decision making. The biases in the postmodern treatment of politics are not accidental. They echo its philosophies and ethics. As Derrida’s philosophy concentrated on the limits of a metaphysics that he thought remains unavoidable, so his accounts of politics focused on aporias such as the way the creation of peoples, law, and authority inevitably carries traces of their absence.16 He treated collective decisions as leaps of madness for which there can be no justification. According to Derrida, any collective regime, organization, or decision hides its arbitrariness and that of the collective identity it presumes. He wrote, “as a performative cannot be just, in the sense of justice, except by founding itself on conventions and so on anterior performatives, buried or not, it always maintains within itself some irruptive violence”.17 Derrida’s point was that any political founding, law making, or collective decision involves one “we” speaking or deciding for another “we” that is governed by the resulting regime, law, or decision. Because the “we” that performs the decisions is not identical with the “we” to whom the decisions applies, the decisions are violent to the Other. Deconstruction probes 15 16 17

J. Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. P. Kamuf (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 65. J. Derrida, “Declarations of Independence”, New Political Science 15 (1986), 7–​15; and J. Derrida, “Force of Law: The ‘Mystical Foundation of Authority’”, Cardozo Law Review 11 (1990), 919–​1047. Derrida, “Force of Law”, 969.

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and disrupts collective decisions to reveal their metaphysical assumptions and their neglect of the Other. Derrida evoked democracy, therefore, not as an organized practice of decision making but as a perpetually deferred ideal by which to critique existing practices: The expression “democracy to come” does indeed translate or call for a militant and interminable political critique. A weapon aimed at the enemies of democracy, it protests against all naïveté and every political abuse, every rhetoric that would present as a present or existing democracy, as a de facto democracy, what remains inadequate to the democratic demand.18 Democracy appears here not as a historically forged and shifting practice but as a quasi-​metaphysical ideal. Postmodern radicals such as Baudrillard, Foucault, and Lyotard sometimes echoed Derrida’s analysis of politics and law as one “we” legislating for another.19 In addition, however, they portrayed collective decisions, whether democratic or not, as the expressions of a totalizing and normalizing power. As they adopted avant-​garde sites and strategies, so they valorized appearances of the haphazard and extraordinary within the ordered and everyday. They associated democratic politics with random and uncaused creativity –​spontaneous eruptions that disrupted power and revealed difference beneath homogeneity. Baudrillard argued that present-​day politics involved an eternal recycling of the same opposed only by rebellious singularities.20 Foucault described liberal democracy as just another form of subjectification, and when he later affirmed an alternative ethic, he ignored democratic organization, turning instead to “directed attacks” wherever one finds “a knot of resistance” or “possible passage”.21 Lyotard viewed power as the elision of the spontaneity and difference that his preferred republicanism then tried to reveal. He defined politics as “the threat of the differend”, and he argued that the political task of today was “to bear witness to differends by finding idioms for them”.22 Politics and

18

J. Derrida, “The Reason of the Strongest (Are there Rogue States?)”, in Rogues: Two Essays on Reason, trans. P-​A Brault and M. Naas (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), p. 86. 19 J-​F. Lyotard, The Differend: Phrases in Dispute, trans. G. van den Abbeele (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988). 20 J. Baudrillard, The Spirit of Terrorism, trans. C. Turner (New York: Verso, 2003). 21 The quotation is from Paul Veyne’s memory of Foucault’s 1979 course. See P. Veyne, “The Final Foucault and his Ethics”, trans. C. Porter and A. Davidson, Critical Inquiry 20 (1993), 7. 22 Lyotard, Differend, p. 13.

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democracy appear here not as practices of collective decision making but as a totalizing power and resistance to it. The postmodernists’ debt to the avant-​garde and structuralism led them to neglect democratic organizations as sources of legitimate decisions. An avant-​ garde emphasis on the totalizing nature of power left postmodernists hostile to all collective decisions irrespective of their democratic legitimacy. A structuralist formalism led postmodernists to quasi-​metaphysical analyses of the alleged paradoxes of democracy. Derrida read the American Declaration of Independence, for example, as instantiating a quasi-​metaphysical transition from a performative to a constitutive “we”.23 He paid little attention to the intentionality of the Founding Fathers or the meanings that later democrats have attached to the Declaration. At best, these postmodern approaches to democracy restate the argument of the last chapter for a universal cosmopolitanism. Postfoundationalism undercuts all attempts to circumscribe a particular “we” as the demos, challenges reified identities and their exclusions, and points outwards towards cosmopolitanism. At worst, postmodern approaches to democracy confuse questions of the ethical ontology of community with questions of the legitimacy of organizations and decisions. No organization –​ no regime, democracy, legal system, or collective decision –​instantiates the community of fellows. Instead, the community of fellows gives postfoundationalists n ­ ormative criteria for forging and contesting organizations. Particular organizations develop historically more or less legitimate procedures for making decisions and for revising those procedures. In contrast to the postmodernists, I believe that postfoundationalists should defend democratic organizations as the means for collectively deciding issues such as the content of welfare and if and when to accept minimal violence. Before I consider democratic theory, however, I should explain why I think that democratic practice, not philosophical analysis, is the way to decide these issues. As I argued in the previous chapter, ethical debates rely on intuitions acting as facts. Philosophy can no more decide the validity of intuitions than it can of empirical facts. Philosophy unpacks the grammar of our concepts to show how beliefs imply and entail one another. For example, philosophical analysis can show that extending social ontology to ethics entails extending the concept of situated agency to that of the community of fellows. Philosophical analysis can also lead people to re-​evaluate facts and intuitions in the light of their other beliefs. Nonetheless, philosophy cannot show that perceptions 23

Derrida, “Declarations of Independence”.

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or intuitions are accurate and exemplary. The objectivity of perceptions and intuitions depends on comparing rival bundles of theories and facts. Objective knowledge arises out of a process of comparing rival perspectives. The objectivity of moral intuitions about welfare and empowerment or about violence and rules depends on a process of debate and comparison not philosophical analysis. Many ethical decisions depend, in other words, on process as much as on substance. The shift from substance to process does not involve turning away from normative issues. It involves addressing normative issues less through analyses of justice than through analyses of collective decision making processes. It turns from questions about the content of welfare and empowerment to questions about the nature of legitimate organizations and processes of collective decision making. It suggests that the former question is best answered by the organizations and processes that are identified in answer to the latter question. If the legitimacy of decisions depends on the procedures by which they are reached, the initial emphasis falls on the criteria that define a legitimate procedure. Here postfoundationalists, like many others, stress the legitimacy of democratic decisions. Democracies are organizations that people form and reform precisely to make collective decisions. For postfoundationalists, the legitimacy of democratic organizations follows partly from familiar considerations. Democracies replace the illusion that there is a divine or metaphysical basis for authority with a recognition that authority is made in history by human activity. In democracies the source of legitimacy is ultimately the will of the members. Further, democracies treat their members as agents, giving them an active role in collective decision making. In democracies, people practice collective self-​rule rather than being ruled over by alien others. Finally, democracies embody something like ideals of fairness and equality. In democracies, the preferences of different members have equal weight or members have an equal right to participate. The general point is that in these and other respects democratic organizations reflect the philosophy and values of the open community. The familiar arguments for democratic organizations are powerful. Yet they raise an acute problem. Because democracies are organizations for making collective decisions, people want them to be a means of reaching correct decisions. Democrats have no obvious grounds, however, for assuming that the legitimacy of democratic decisions also makes them correct. One response to this acute problem is to restrict the role of democracy. Liberals typically refuse to allow democracy to interfere with what they view as the correct decision to recognize specific universal and inalienable rights. Another popular response to this acute problem is to suggest that democratic organizations just

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do generally lead to correct decisions as identified by philosophy. Deliberative democrats often justify democratic organizations by insisting that they are more likely than alternatives to reach what philosophy independently shows are correct decisions. Postmodernism gave a particular spin to discussions about the relation of democratic decisions to correct decisions. On the one hand, postmodernists argued that liberals and deliberative democrats have no grounds for insisting on the universal correctness of the ethical values by which they tame and defend democratic decision-​making. They denied that reasonable people would or should agree about the ethical justification of a decision. On the other hand, liberals and deliberative democrats argued that postmodernism effectively collapses into antagonistic decisionism. They suggested that without an independent standard of correctness, postmodernism had no grounds for justifying any decision. I am suggesting that postfoundationalism offers a different way of reconciling democratic procedures with correct outcomes. On the one hand, postfoundationalism casts doubt on the possibility of independent knowledge of just decisions. But, on the other hand, postfoundationalism suggests that democratic organizations actively create knowledge. Democracy fosters good decisions because the outcomes of democratic deliberations are what count as moral knowledge. Whereas liberal and deliberative democrats evoke independent ideas of correctness that can have anti-​democratic and exclusionary implications, my postfoundationalism ties correctness to the outcomes of democratic procedures. Where postmodernists reject all ideas of correctness and so get entangled with agonistic decisionism, my postfoundationalism implies that there are good reasons to treat the outcomes of democratic deliberations as correct. Here the epistemic value of democracy echoes my analyses of objective knowledge and moral intuitions. A rejection of theory-​independent facts and intuitions undermines appeals to criteria by which to judge the outcomes of democratic practices. Equally, an analysis of objective knowledge as the outcome of debates and procedures raises the possibility of defending democracy as a practice that produces such knowledge. Within the context of an open community, postfoundationalism thus redirects debates about justice to debates about democratic organizations. Democratic procedures consistent with the open community are what make decisions legitimate and correct. Both the ethical and epistemic validity of the decisions comes from the democratic procedures. My arguments for democratic organizations superficially appear compatible with both liberal representative democracy and deliberative participatory democracy. Liberal democracy provides some measure of self-​rule and equality,

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and representative assemblies provide a focus for debate. Nonetheless, liberal representative democracy relies largely on aggregative procedures that underplay some of the key features that make democracy legitimate. It relies mainly on voting as a means of aggregating expressed preferences in a way that overly atomizes individuals, removing them from debates. In contrast, deliberative democracy reflects a postfoundational rejection of autonomous subjectivity and belief in situated agency. Also, deliberative democracy gives greater scope to the role of dialogue and debate in transforming and validating beliefs and intuitions. Where voting involves each individual expressing their separate preference, deliberation involves individuals entering a dialogue with one another about the correctness of their respective beliefs, intuitions, and theories. Deliberative democratic organizations are settings in which situated agents interact, attempting both to persuade one another and to improve their own beliefs. Members provide one another with reasons, listen to one another’s arguments, and reflect on their respective views. They challenge one another to describe and defend various beliefs, prompting them to modify their beliefs in response to criticisms, and perhaps even probing the criteria and purposes by which they justify their beliefs. It is this process of dialogue, not the aggregation of preferences, which makes democracy a source of knowledge. There are reasons to believe that in some circumstances aggregating votes reduces the likelihood of error. The Condorcet Jury Theorem states, for example, that if all voters are more likely than not to reach a correct answer, then the probability of a correct answer increases with the number of voters. However, postfoundationalism suggests that aggregating votes is at best inadequate and at worst may systematically promote errors. Aggregation is inadequate because it ignores the role of dialogue and criticism in the production of knowledge. Unlike deliberation, aggregation does not allow fully for citizens learning from one another. Further, aggregation may actively reinforce errors, especially about ethics. Recall here my argument in the previous chapter that there is no external reality that moral intuitions track. Shared intuitions are not products of reliable perceptual faculties in the way shared facts are. They may have disgraceful origins. Even if a large majority ascribe to certain intuitions, these intuitions should be subject to genealogical probing and democratic scrutiny. Unlike aggregation, deliberation provides a way of loosening the hold of intuitions so as to evaluate them afresh. Although postfoundationalists support deliberative democracy, their version of deliberative democracy has distinctive features. Deliberative democrats sometimes require that deliberative decisions be ones on which all reasonable people agree. The legitimacy of the decision comes not only from the democratic procedure but more importantly from its being a rational

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outcome as defined by the independent standard of everybody endorsing it. In contrast, postfoundationalism leads to skepticism about consensus and independent standards of rationality. Consensus hides difference and power, and it can reflect a complacent failure to probe the genealogy of shared moral intuitions. Postfoundationalism thus allows for reasonable disagreement. It ties the legitimacy of the outcomes entirely to the fairness and epistemic role of deliberative democratic procedures. Similarly, deliberative democrats sometimes limit topics of debate to the common good and particular courses of action. They want to overcome the background perspectives –​the cultural, epistemological, and ethical assumptions –​that inform people’s views. In contrast, postfoundationalism extends deliberation to the different cultural, epistemological, and ethical assumptions associated with various perspectives. Postfoundationalism emphasizes the inevitability of people drawing on particular perspectives and traditions. It thus treats background assumptions not as prejudices to be overcome but as resources for deliberation. Disagreement is not a threat to democracy or community but rather constitutive of them. Knowledge arises not from transcending particular perspectives to find consensus but out of a contest in which particular perspectives engage, criticize, and respond to one another. Decisions about welfare and empowerment are legitimate when they are products of the fair and knowledge-​producing practices of democratic organizations. The constitution of a democracy consists in its arrangements for collective decision-​making. The members of the democracy come together through such a constitution. Their membership does not derive from an allegedly prior and fixed identity, whether ethnic, cultural, or religious. Nonetheless, the constitution of a democracy generally specifies criteria of membership and requires members to submit to it. Democracies thus exclude others and stifle difference. Yet, as the postmodernists argue, power and exclusions are inevitable. What matters, therefore, is that democratic organizations contain processes for amending themselves. Members constantly contest, reinterpret, amend, and transform their constitutions. A democratic organization has rules for admitting new members, but the rules can be debated and overturned. A democratic organization has procedures for fair decision making, but the procedures and the content of fairness can be questioned and remade. A democracy can provide special protections for the rights that its members believe are particularly important for human flourishing, but these rights can be challenged and reinterpreted. Democracy is, in this sense, a continuous experiment undertaken in history by situated agents. One task for postfoundationalists is to use their agency to make the experiment better reflect the open community.

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Conclusion

In the chapters on ethics, I have drawn on postfoundational historicism and humanism to respond to the moral issues associated with the modern dilemmas of knowledge and subjectivity. The dilemma of knowledge reappears here as that of justifying ethical claims and especially universal claims. In the chapter on critique, I argued that postfoundational historicism provides an analysis of genealogy that does not slide into relativism or totalizing critique. I also suggested that postfoundational historicism and humanism can sustain ­critical approaches to historical ontology and ideology. In the chapter on universalism, I argued that postfoundational humanism undermines reifications of cultures and thereby inspires a universal cosmopolitanism. I also suggested that my earlier analysis of objective knowledge could cover ethics with intuitions taking the place of facts and with a special role being given to genealogical critiques of these intuitions. The dilemma of subjectivity reappears in ethics as that of freedom. In this chapter, I have linked freedom to situated agency within the open community and democratic organizations. The postmodern radicals portray society as the locus of an invidious power that oppresses and normalizes; their ethic focuses on resisting social power with excess and transgression. In contrast, I argued that postfoundationalism can support a communitarian ethic. Postfoundationalism implies that people can hold beliefs and perform actions only in community. Individuals are mutually dependent. The ethical corollary of my postfoundational humanism is, therefore, a community of fellows who are concerned with one another’s welfare and empowerment. After discussing the communitarian implications of postfoundationalism, I rewrote the avant-​ garde themes of the radical postmodernists not as a rejection of community but as a call for an open community. This open community eschews fixed identities in order to instantiate a respect for agency, a preference for persuasion over violence, an emphasis on ethical conduct, a critical stance to received identities, and friendliness to others. To evoke an open community of fellows is, however, to do little to fill-​out its concrete form. Even when postfoundationalists adopt values such as fellowship, welfare, and empowerment, they need to decide what practices and policies best express these values. This decision depends, however, less on philosophical analysis than on democratic organizations. It is through deliberative democratic practices that people generate moral knowledge. A postfoundational historicism and humanism echoes postmodernism as well as amending it. On the one hand, postfoundationalism undermines liberal appeals to autonomous individuals, neutral standpoints, and natural

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rights. Postfoundationalists use genealogies to unsettle allegedly neutral or given moral positions. They appeal to ethical conduct and the questioning of identities to express and protect difference. On the other hand, however, a historicist analysis of social explanation provides grounds for genealogical and other critiques. Further, a humanist analysis of situated agency provides grounds for postulating the open community and democratic organization as criteria by which to demarcate good and bad forms of conduct. Foucault wrote of transgression as a “nonpositive affirmation”: Transgression contains nothing negative, but affirms limited being –​ affirms the limitlessness into which it leaps as it open this zone to existence for the first time. But correspondingly, this affirmation contains nothing positive: no content can bind it, since, by definition, no limit can possibly restrict it.24 Whatever Foucault’s own politics, this absence of positive content leaves no grounds for precluding violent and racist transgressions of other norms. Postfoundational humanism provides such grounds in its positive commitment to the open community and democratic organization. 24

Foucault, “Preface to Transgression”, pp. 35–​6.

Conclusion

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Historicism and Humanism When Friedrich Nietzsche wrote, “God is dead”, he proclaimed an end to both religious faith and metaphysics.1 Nietzsche grasped the magnitude of reason’s successful assault on Christianity as few other thinkers had. People had to come to terms with the fact that there is only this world and it has no meaning. The world is purely natural and it lacks intrinsic moral properties. There is no truer and more real world. Nor is there a truer and more real meaning built into this world. The death of God thus signaled the end not only of overtly religious speculation but also post-​Kantian metaphysics. It precluded Immanuel Kant’s idea of transcendental philosophy. And it precluded G. W. F. Hegel’s idea of philosophy as the study of the dialectical movement of spirit. Nietzsche’s rejection of metaphysics made him suspicious of contemporary religion, philosophy, and ethics. He suggested that as life has no divine or metaphysical meaning, any projection of such meaning on to it must be a human act. He probed at the human beliefs, desires, and interests that lurked below the surface of knowledge and morality. According to Nietzsche, religious and metaphysical accounts of a spiritual and moral order sprang from a decadent and life-​denying weakness. The weak and envious created false truths and false moralities, often in an unconscious attempt to resist the strong and healthy. The weak were afraid of life in this world, so they built alternative worlds where they could hide. As Nietzsche rejected metaphysics and challenged contemporary knowledge, so he affirmed life. The end of religion and metaphysics heralded the rise of the human. Nietzsche wrote: “we deny God, we deny responsibility in God: thus alone do we save the world”.2 Life and its enhancement are all we have. They provide us with the only measure by which to judge. The weak take refuge in a belief in another world and try to bring down the strong. But the strong accept life as it is. They revel in their will, vigor, and lust for power. They open themselves to their lives and fates in the here and now. They spurn the false comforts of metaphysics. Their love of life enables them to welcome it despite its meaninglessness. They say “yes” to life despite its untruthfulness.

1 F. Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. W. Kaufman (New York: Vintage Books, 1974), sec. 125. 2 F. Nietzsche, “Twilight of the Idols”, in Twilight of the Idols, with the Antichrist and Ecce Homo (London: Wadsworth, 2007), p. 36.

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The postmodernists echoed Nietzsche’s rejection of metaphysics. They also shared his suspicion of contemporary discourse, reason, and ethics. In particular, they rejected foundationalist appeals to given or fully attainable truths. Jean-​Francois Lyotard wrote, for example, “I define post-​modern as incredulity towards metanarratives”, where metanarratives are the allegedly transcendent truths of knowledge and civilization.3 However, although the postmodernists set themselves up against metaphysics and foundationalism, they rarely affirmed life –​the history of human activity in the natural world. On the contrary, a debt to structuralism and the avant-​garde left many of them hostile to historicism and humanism. Instead of looking to life and its history, they often appealed to quasi-​structures. Instead of promoting a positive vision of an authentic life after metaphysics, they often appealed to a resistance lacking constructive content. I followed the postmodernists in rejecting metaphysics and foundationalism. But I then used life as a basis for philosophizing. In doing so, I affirmed a postfoundational historicism and humanism. Life thus made a dual appearance in my arguments. Life appeared, firstly, as the basis of my philosophical arguments. The end of metaphysics implies that philosophy cannot be the study of a priori necessities given to pure reason. Instead philosophy appears as a study of the entailments and implications of a web of concepts. Although people could challenge any web of concepts, they are committed to those concepts in accord with which they live their own lives. Philosophical arguments gain the force of necessity, therefore, not form a priori reasoning but from revealing conceptual connections that people cannot set aside without dramatically reformulating their shared way of life. Philosophical and ethical knowledge arises out of studies of the logical relations among the beliefs on which people act. Life appeared, secondly, as the conclusion of my philosophical arguments. I argued that the concepts on which we act commit us to historicism and humanism. To conclude, I want to highlight the place of historicism and humanism in my arguments about history, philosophy, and ethics. My postfoundational historicism and humanism responds to the problems that beset the developmental historicism of the nineteenth century. It inspires a philosophical analysis of subjectivity and the human sciences that stresses the role of compassionate narratives. It provides a cosmopolitan and democratic response to new globalizing patterns of organization.

3 J-​F. Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), p. xxiv.

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History

What role do historicism and humanism play in modern thought? Life provides the basis of my answer. My histories present human activity as the source of thought and practice. Modern thought arose as individuals grappled with dilemmas against the background of inherited traditions. Of course, “modernity” is a complex and variegated term that refers to an awry of loosely connected transformations in social, economic, and political organization. Further, the transformations were not rapid and revolutionary but gradual and sporadic. The agents of change often had roots in earlier times. Prominent among them were improving landowners, gentlemanly financiers, public moralists, and rational peasants. Finally, the transformations were anything but uniform. Different spatial and temporal sites experienced distinctive and contested modernities –​liberal and conservative, imperial and subaltern, gendered and others. As the Enlightenment inspired liberal modernities across Europe, so it soon gave way to romantic organicism. The romantics offered both conservative reactions against the Enlightenment, as with Samuel Coleridge and Joseph de Maistre, and liberal restatements of Enlightenment ideals, as with Wilhelm von Humboldt and John Stuart Mill. Irrespective of their politics, the romantics replaced the mechanistic ideas and tropes of the Enlightenment with organic ones about life, evolution, and purpose. Their organicism overlapped with historicist and humanist themes. They highlighted historical and cultural development and human imagination and creativity. However, the romantics tamed the anti-​metaphysical and centrifugal nature of these themes by appealing to a purpose and reason allegedly immanent in this world. Their historicism thus rejected transcendental arguments but not metaphysics. Hegel famously reworked Kantian ideas to make them the product of spirit unfolding through history. He argued that reality comes from thought and in particular from the dialectical movement of reason from a concept through its negation to a higher synthesis. History appeared as the inevitable march of reason towards the self-​realization of the individual and absolute spirit. Throughout the nineteenth century, philosophers and social theorists flocked to various developmental historicisms, including Hegelian idealism, Marxism, Whig historiography, Comtean positivism, and evolutionary theory. Developmental historicists made sense of human life through historical narratives. They explained actions and institutions by locating them in their cultural and historical contexts. However, they suggested that all cultures followed a broadly similar and inexorable path of historical development. Hegelian idealists thought of history as objective spirit realizing itself. Marx’s historical

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materialism implied that history revealed a dialectical movement from feudalism through capitalism to communism. Whig historiography spread the idea that all societies developed in stages from hunting and gathering through pastoralism and later agriculture to a mercantile and civil society. Comtean positivists believed that history progressed from a theological era to an abstract metaphysical one and on to finish with scientific positivism. Other evolutionary theorists also thought that societies progressed in accord with dynamic laws. Herbert Spencer argued, for example, that history was characterized by a constant increase in individual freedom. Nietzsche remained an outlier with his explorations of the anti-​metaphysical and centrifugal effects of a more radical historicism. Developmental ­historicism continued to flourish until the crisis of historicism and, more importantly, the First World War. When it declined, it was replaced not by Nietzschean genealogies but by modernist formalisms. The crisis of historicism posed questions about the possibility of knowledge, the dangers of anachronism, and the postulate of historical unity. The War eroded belief in reason and progress. Modernism then flourished as people responded to the crisis of historicism and the War by adopting atomistic and formal approaches. Modernists characteristically combined an empiricist appeal to atomized appearances or facts (and the relevant signs and propositions) with a reliance on formal and synchronic analysis and theorizing. They rejected historical narratives in favor of models, correlations, classifications, and other formal explanations. Their sciences tried to capture appearances in formal propositions and synchronic systems. Modernism swept forward in phenomenology, analytic philosophy, and logical empiricism. Phenomenology focused on rigorous inspections of the content and structure of intentionality and consciousness, bracketing-​off questions about the historical origins of this content. For Edmund Husserl, phenomenology was the a priori study of the nature of thought and mind. Analytic philosophers appealed to formal analyses of concepts and propositions to reveal their philosophical standing. For G. E. Moore, analysis involved decomposing complex concepts into their basic parts. For Bertrand Russell, analysis involved transforming propositions to reveal the logical structures in their linguistic forms. Logical empiricists such as Rudolf Carnap concentrated on the search for a logical language or universal grammar lurking beneath the surface of conventional languages. They believed that this logical language would unify the sciences and solve philosophical problems. In the human sciences, modernism appeared in two principal guises. Some modernists adopted a formal economic concept of rationality as utility maximization. Neoclassical economists used the ideas of utility and profit

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maximization analytically to derive supply and demand curves. These supply and demand curves combined in a general equilibrium that decided relative prices and so the distribution of income. Game theorists and rational choice theorists extended the analysis of utility maximization to non-​market settings where there were no prices. Other modernists adopted an equally formal sociological concept of rationality as appropriate speech and behavior as defined by a set norms or other system. They explained particulars by locating them in a synchronic system or set of relations. The particulars appeared either as expressions of more general rules or as products of the structural relations among them. Modernism pushed aside historicism and to an extent humanism. Developmental historicists were unable to respond adequately to the dilemmas associated with the crisis of historicism and the First World War. People lost faith in the romantic idea of a divine spirit immanent in nature and governing history. Old historicist appeals to a progressive development seemed implausible. Modernists explained actions not by locating them in their historical contexts, but by formal models of rational action or by locating them in synchronic systems. Old humanist appeals to a universal reason also seemed implausible. Many modernists explained actions not as products of intentionality but as manifestations of structures and systems. Further, even when human scientists did explore individual intentionality, they often stressed non-​rational psychological factors, including desire, propaganda, and the unconscious. The rise of modernism may sometimes have pushed historicism and perhaps also humanism to the background of intellectual life, but historicism and humanism continued to capture many people’s imagination. Even if developmental historicism appeared implausible –​and it continued to dominate various national histories –​its decline did not compel people to reject all other forms of historicism and humanism. On the contrary, historicists often responded to the crisis of historicism and the loss of faith in reason and progress by trying to purge historicism of its more developmental themes. For a start, philosophers such as R. G. Collingwood and Hans-​Georg Gadamer reworked historicist and idealist traditions to separate them from teleological concepts of the absolute and objective spirit. They argued that action expressed the actor’s intentionality, which could be understood only in the context of a historical way of life or tradition; but they did not present history as inherently progressive. Because they did not postulate a progressive unity to history, they tried to base the possibility of historical knowledge in reenactment or the hermeneutic circle. In addition, historians and other human scientists sometimes adopted a modernist historicism. Instead of using developmental principles to

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select and order facts, they appealed to rigorous methods to secure atomized facts, which in turn supported broader interpretations. Because they rejected teleological and substantive principles, they defended their historical claims by appealing to their sources and the professional norms governing research. Historical theory increasingly focused on questions about archival research, the validity of evidence, methodology, and valid inference. Finally, humanism remained at least as prominent as historicism. When philosophers reworked idealism to purge it of developmental themes, they rejected absolute spirit, but many of them still analyzed human action in vitalist terms rather than the more mechanistic ones associated with modernism. Like Collingwood and Gadamer, Isaiah Berlin and Jean-​Paul Sartre rejected the metaphysical pretensions of the absolute. They grounded philosophy in experience while arguing that people’s intentions, choices, and actions are undetermined. People are intentional agents who can be free. Life is thus the conclusion as well as the basis of my historical arguments. The narratives in ­chapters 3 and 4 offer critical genealogies of the structuralist and avant-​garde traditions that deny human agency and dismiss the everyday. These narratives open the way to vindications of life from the perspective of postfoundational historicism and humanism. These vindicatory histories might show how in the twentieth century historicists and humanists provided both suitable responses to the questions raised by the crisis of historicism and a suitable distance from developmental ideas of reason and progress. They also might show how thinkers, including Michel Foucault, grappled with various dilemmas in ways that drove them away from modernism towards a historicist commitment to genealogy and a humanist concern with the arts of existence. They might trace the historical background to present-​day ideas about the ineluctably historical and creative nature of human life. 2

Philosophy

What role do historicism and humanism play in present-​day philosophy? Here too life provides the basis of my answer. My philosophical arguments do not depend on a pure reason engaged in transcendental speculation and deduction. They analyze the entailments and implications of concepts that arose out of the history of human activity. Because the objects of consciousness are partially constructed by theories, philosophy cannot give knowledge of simple presences. Philosophy is, rather, the exploration of objects that are partially produced by human life. Nonetheless, to accept the historical nature of thought is not to imply that philosophy provides insights only into personal

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consciousness. On the contrary, the conclusions of philosophical analyses are valid for all those who make objects by using broadly similar theories. Although philosophy cannot provide certain knowledge, it can provide knowledge that is valid for all those who share a form of life. Further, there is no a priori reason to deny that there might be, at a suitable level of abstraction, family resemblances and overlapping features common to all plausible forms of life. Many philosophers have prided themselves on discovering invariances. Since Plato, they have thought of their discipline as identifying the fixed terms and structures of reason and perhaps even the world. Jacques Derrida offered a slightly altered version of this view of philosophy. He argued that deconstruction reveals the invariant quasi-​structure of a metaphysics people cannot avoid, and it then marks the problems and limits of this metaphysics. Historicism challenges Platonic, Derridean, and other views of philosophy that ignore the temporal nature of concepts, theories, and quasi-​structures, presenting them instead as universal presences or the universal marks of absences. Historicism treats philosophy as a series of transient claims and beliefs that are subject to fashion, longings, and transformations. Thought and world alike are in perpetual flux. The historical nature of human activity makes fixed terms an inappropriate ideal for knowledge. The point is not just that historicism dissolves, in piecemeal fashion, the leading themes of religious and metaphysical speculation. It is that historicism erodes any possibility of thought escaping the flux of history to discover final truths about the world and our place in it. Because philosophy is historically situated, it cannot fix the terms, limits, quasi-​structures, or conclusions of reason outside of reason’s own history. No study of philosophy can ignore historical change. A proper assessment of philosophical arguments always involves embedding those arguments in a historical narrative. History is, in this sense, necessarily part of all the problems that philosophers study. No philosopher –​not even philosophers of nature and science –​can afford to ignore history. The idea that philosophy is a historical activity is far from new. Hegel expressed the idea powerfully, and it took root among many nineteenth century thinkers. However, the nineteenth century historicists chained historicism to a developmental stump. My radical historicism thus historicizes their developmental historicism. It dismantles the teleological attempt to locate fixity at the conclusion of the evolution of reason. This radical historicism rejects any access to the world as it is apart from people’s theoretical construction of it. It suggests that all claims about the world are contestable; none are self-​evident; all could be rejected. It implies that the world as it appears to us and the claims we make about that world are alike products of our natural and social histories. Knowledge is not a fixed, closed, and external set of truths that an

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individual might acquire through experience and reason. It is incomplete, provisional, and inherited through tradition. In this sense, truth is not an abstract system waiting for people to discover it. It is a historical product of people’s everyday lives and activities, and it is constantly negotiated and processed in social practices. Historicism and humanism imply a distinct view of philosophical knowledge. In addition, they have substantive implications for analyses of language and action. They imply that language and action, like philosophy, are historical products of human activity. As I argued in ­chapters 5 through 7, this analysis of language and action comes from the grammar of the concepts informing everyday life. In their everyday actions, people treat themselves and others as agents. They make sense of actions using folk psychology with its ideas of intentionality, reason, belief, and desire. Thus, meaning is not a product of a semiotic system of differences. Meaning arises from people expressing their historically-​situated intentionality in speech and other actions. More generally, individuals are not the passive effects of social discourses. People are situated agents who act for reasons of their own, and although their reasoning occurs against the background of an inherited tradition, they can reflect on this inheritance and so come to change it. My analysis of language and action undermines many concepts of “structure”, but historicists and humanists still can recognize that there are patterns in social life and that these patterns sometimes reflect relatively stable social relations. If “structure” referred only to these patterns, it would thus not be problematic. However, the word “structure” typically does more than describe a pattern. For modernist human scientists, structures and institutions do not just describe contingent patterns of activity; they explain the relevant actions. In this view, actions follow the norms that govern an institution or they fulfill the functional requirements of structures and systems. For many structuralists and poststructuralists, “structure” refers, specifically, to a synchronic system of binary oppositions and differential relationships (of presence or absence) that explain people’s actions. In this view, actors passively reproduce abstract discourses and social relations. Historicists and humanists reject all such ascriptions of explanatory power to patterns and structures. They view structures, so imagined, as reifications that wrongly privilege synchrony and system over diachrony and agency. People make the social world by acting on reasons that they adopt against the background of an inherited tradition. Historicism and humanism point here to a social constructivism that highlights the role of consciousness in the social world to which it refers. People make the social world by acting on meanings and beliefs, and they also make these meanings and beliefs by

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applying, extending, and transforming traditions. This constructivist social theory implies that knowledge takes on a distinct quality in the human sciences. People’s knowledge of the social world is not independent of the objects to which it refers. If people believe that inflation is likely and they therefore successfully press wage-​claims, they might create the inflation in which they believed. If everyone believes that a literary text is a classic that schools should teach, it becomes so. Thus, beliefs about the social world are true or false only in a qualified sense. They are not true or false of a mind-​ independent world. Their truth depends on their adequately tracking other people’s beliefs. If someone does not believe that a literary text is a classic and yet it becomes so, that person was not wrong about the text so much as what other people would think about the text. If someone believes that rational actors will respond to particular circumstances in ways that create inflation and they do so, that person was not right about inflation so much as what a particular group of actors would think and do. So, the human sciences cannot provide cumulative knowledge of a mind-​independent world. They cannot be about a mind-​independent world because social life consists of intentional agency. And they cannot be cumulative because intentional agency is historically variable. Modernist approaches to the human sciences typically fail to allow adequately for the constructed nature of social life. They treat social life as if it –​ or at least bits of it –​existed apart from what people believe about it. They often base the human sciences on allegedly objective observations rather than accounts of subjective consciousness. They regard historical contingency and contextual specificity as obstacles to be overcome in the search for cross-​temporal and cross-​cultural regularities. Their explanations of social life seek to capture these ahistorical regularities in correlations, classifications, or formal models. From a historicist and humanist perspective, however, modernist correlations, classifications, and models are not properly speaking explanations at all. They are data that human scientists might explain using contextualizing narratives. Correlations and classifications merely point to patterns in social life. They can become explanations only if human scientists unpack them as narratives about how certain beliefs came together in a way that made possible certain actions and practices. Similarly, although models appeal to beliefs and desires, they are mere fables. Models can become explanations only if human scientists provide empirical evidence that they accurately depict the beliefs and desires that people really held in a particular case. Finally, even when human scientists treat correlations, classifications, and models as shorthand for narrative explanations based on intentional agency, they still have to provide historical accounts of the traditions informing the relevant beliefs. They

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cannot treat the beliefs as epiphenomena explicable by objective facts about the world, social formations, or a purportedly universal rationality. Life is thus the outcome as well as the source of my philosophy. Historicism implies that explanations of human life take the form of narratives. Humanism implies that these narratives involve a compassion associated with understanding other people from their own perspectives. A belief in compassionate narratives contrasts with the postmodernists’ more dismissive and condescending attitude to people and everyday life. Too many postmodernists dismiss people as the vessels of quasi-​structures or reified regimes of power. They adopt allegedly superior perspectives and technical vocabularies to present people’s everyday beliefs and concerns as false, shallow, and stupid. They treat people’s everyday struggles as misguided reproductions of logocentric thought and normalizing power. In contrast, compassionate narratives affirm peoples’ everyday efforts to understand the world, adapt to it, and remake it. People’s lives –​ their beliefs, struggles, and concerns –​are the substance of history. 3

Ethics

What role do historicism and humanism play in present-​day ethics? Ethics –​ like all philosophy –​is a product of life. Ethics is a historical product of human agency. People make ethics by thinking and acting on intuitions and ideas in changing social contexts. Further, historicism and humanism highlight the inherently critical potential of the human sciences, thus blurring the distinction between social theory and ethics. The humanist emphasis on situated agency implies that people can alter their beliefs and act on the results of their reasoning. Philosophical and social theories are thus not just passive descriptions of life; they are interventions in life. Unlike the natural sciences, philosophy and the human sciences influence the objects that they study. Obviously, the natural sciences produce knowledge that leads people to act in ways that can have a dramatic impact on the world. Nonetheless, the human sciences constitute the world that they depict in a way the natural sciences do not. The natural sciences create technologies with which people can transform the objects that these sciences study but these objects are otherwise impervious to the thought of the natural sciences. The human sciences not only can create technologies with which people try to govern and transform social life; they also study objects that can learn what is thought of them and so alter their earlier beliefs and actions. The people studied by the human sciences can themselves adopt ideas that arise in those human sciences. Further, when people adopt social theories, those theories become embedded in their actions and

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so in the social practices to which these actions give rise. Any account of the social world has the potential to transform the world it describes. The human sciences necessarily have critical potential. Allow me to emphasize the point: no matter what individual human scientists might believe, their ideas necessarily invite people to act in some ways and not others. Too many modernists elide the ethical content of their work. Their scientism leads them to present their work mainly as contributing to scholarship and inspiring scientific technologies; they ignore its practical ethical content. From a humanist perspective, their scientism is an intellectual and a moral failing. Their scientism is an intellectual failing because it is wrong in its view that the natural sciences provide a suitable model for the social sciences. Their scientism is a moral failing because it involves an abdication of responsibility and it fosters a dehumanizing way of life. Philosophical and social theories are necessarily guides to ways of being in the world. Sometimes the ethical content of these theories is critical. The theories identify the unacknowledged conditions and the unintended consequences of beliefs, actions, and practices. By highlighting these conditions and consequences, the theories enable situated agents better to understand themselves and the world. Critical interventions try to increase people’s knowledge and reflexivity. They extend people’s awareness of what otherwise would remain hidden historical, unconscious, and social features of beliefs and actions. At other times the ethical content of social theories is inspirational. The relevant theories provide normative and practical reasons for acting in certain ways and pursuing certain ends. By suggesting that some ends are valuable and some actions are effective ways of realizing those ends, the theories give situated agents reasons to alter themselves and their world. Inspirational interventions seek to promote flourishing and create a better world. They increase people’s awareness of ideals and ways to advance these ideals. Radical historicism undermines appeals to divine and teleological sources of inspiration. Equally, however, because there is no harmonious reality free from power and alienation, there is no reason to denigrate this world. The human world consists of people struggling to make the best of themselves and their circumstances according to their own light. Our hopes for ourselves may differ from, or clash with, their hopes for themselves. We may even believe that people are mistaken in their understanding of themselves and their ambitions. Nonetheless, we can still believe that they should make their own lives. We can still listen to the narratives by which they make sense of their lives. And we can still show compassion for their lives and their hopes. In ­chapters 9 and 10, I thus defended an open and cosmopolitan community. The open community echoes historicism and humanism in accepting agency

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and contingency; it prefers persuasion to violence, it stresses ethical conduct over moral rules, and it fosters skepticism towards received identities. In addition, the open community involves a fellowship based on concern for one another’s welfare and empowerment. A concept of fellowship is an important counter to prominent trends in the world today. Some of these trends are intellectual ones: many commentators believe that the end of metaphysics has produced an increasingly fragmented intellectual world with few philosophical resources for community and cosmopolitanism. The most important trends are, however, social ones. The globalization of economies, technologies, laws, governing networks, and communications has created a world over which most people have little influence. Power and decision-​making remain with inaccessible elites, many of whom are insulated from democratic accountability. The growth of transnational and global interactions places a premium on collective action to engage neoliberal and other modernist styles of organization. So, even if individuals, social movements, nations, and states have few reasons to recognize the rights and claims of others, mutual recognition, respect, and tolerance are the only breaks available to selfishness, self-​righteousness, and violence. The historicist and humanist outlook of the open community contrasts with modernist expertise. Modernist expertise refers to the use of formal social theories –​correlations, classifications, and models –​to develop and promote public policies and organizational strategies. This modernist expertise has become ever more prevalent over the past century. Much of the twentieth century witnessed the rise of hierarchic and bureaucratic organizations housing experts who worked out policies and strategies. States, corporations, and other organizations drew on modernist knowledge to govern social life. Later, during the last quarter of the twentieth century, neoliberals launched an attack of these bureaucracies, but they did so to promote another form of modernism. Neoliberals relied on neoclassical economics to champion the efficiency and legitimacy of markets and quasi-​markets. More recently still, some modernists have crafted a form of expertise that shifts policies and strategies away from markets as well as hierarchies. Their new institutionalism has inspired efforts to create and promote networks, partnerships, and joined-​up arrangements. As the open community echoes historicism and humanism, it replaces modernist expertise with democratic organization and decision-​ making. Recognition of agency and contingency leads to a participatory and dialogic approach to policy and strategy. This democratic approach to decision making has practical and ethical benefits. In practical terms, it dispenses with the fallacy of expertise in a way that result in more effective organization and policy. Modernist expertise encourages decision makers mistakenly to believe

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that they can create policies to get certain results. When human agency and historical contexts interfere, the policies fail. More participatory and dialogic approaches would allow decision makers to hear how people are likely to react to a given decision and so what results a policy is likely to have. In ethical terms, participation and dialogue are ways of respecting people’s capacities for creative agency and local reasoning. Democracy allows people to discuss issues, revise one another’s beliefs and opinions, and collectively decide the ways in which they will govern their affairs. Promoting democracy over modernist expertise is among the most important political tasks of today. However, democracy has itself become a favorite technique of modernist experts. Modernist human scientists claim to have discovered formal links between democracy and improved legitimacy and effectiveness. Policy makers regularly introduce democratic reforms not as an expression of historicist and humanist ideas but as a modernist strategy to realize these ends. Further, because the elites and experts believe that they know what should be the results of democratic reforms, the reforms often result in incorporation and consultation rather than participation and dialogue. Finally, when the experts prove fallible and the reforms do not produce the promised improvements in legitimacy and effectiveness, the policy makers often find they have no reason to promote democracy. There may be more hope in social movements working from the bottom-​up to change society. However, these social movements must be democratic organizations in which questions of identity, legitimacy, and sovereignty remain open to continual discussion. Democratic organization ensures that new identities may emerge, authorities may have their legitimacy taken away, and domains of governance may be redrawn. Once again life is thus the conclusion as well as the source of my arguments. My ethical arguments respond to the continual flux of human activity. People are bound to one another in relations of dependence, but there is no fixed ideal to which these relations should correspond. The ideal is, rather, something that people constantly make and remake through democratic action. Democratic organizations are the setting and the outcome of such action. They have the potential to transform themselves, adopting new practices to solve new problems and to rethink their purposes and values. Democracy is, in this sense, a continuous experiment. Democratic theorists go awry when they fixate on a particular set of representative institutions or the alleged preconditions of effective deliberation. The point of democracy is not to tame the flux of life in a pre-​defined political order; it is to develop and spread innovative forms of participation and dialogue throughout the policy cascade and society. Similarly, the point of democratic theory is not to dictate forms of participation

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and dialogue to organizations; it is to learn from cases and highlight spaces for innovations in opinion formation, decision making, collaborative governance, and dispute resolution. 4

Conclusion

After God, there is only natural history. The processes of natural history happen temporarily to have produced a species that acts and thinks about its actions. Human life consists solely of this species’ activity. There are no structures –​not even structures of difference –​that explain this activity. Nor are there meanings that transcend it. The social world is thus makeshift and haphazard. It is constantly being patched anew in ways that alter it. It is the clumsy and awkward result of individuals’ activity. People’s actions never fit seamlessly. They overlap and jostle for space. They bang into one another. They rub together, altering one another’s shape. They can rest against one another like boulders, touching in places but otherwise separated by large gaps. They can erode one another’s rough edges leaving thin-​grained sand. They can even obliterate one another. Legislators can try to mould them into complimentary shapes that fit together like bricks in a wall. Yet a closer look shows that the wall remains rough and uneven. The actions retain their individual contours and textures. There remain gaps between them. They still rub against one another, eroding and obliterating. Although people’s actions do not fit seamlessly, they often produce patterns. Some patterns persist for long periods. Others appear in several different places and at several different times. Nonetheless, these patterns are never results of independent and necessary causal processes. Life occurs entirely within a purely natural world, but this world contains different kinds of objects that have different capacities. Unlike rocks and processes of erosion, human life is intentional. People act for conscious, subconscious, and unconscious reasons. Actions come from people’s reasons –​their beliefs and desires –​and reasoning is creative. Patterns of reasoning and action are, therefore, contingent products of undetermined and open-​ended processes. People are not heroes, transcending their contexts to fulfill some divine or metaphysical task; but nor are they powerless dupes, functioning as the unwitting tools of the reified contexts and forces that allegedly determine their fates. People appear here as a situated agents engaged in making their lives. Their worlds are fragile ones that could fall apart at any moment. New ideas, experiences, encounters, and natural and social forces constantly require people to adapt and innovate. People constantly reshape and rebuild their precarious

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worlds as best they can while simultaneously living within them. When philosophers believed in grand metaphysical dramas –​good against evil or the ­realization of objective spirit –​they raised transcendent battles above the mundanity of everyday life. In the absence of any grand metaphysical drama, the transcendent falls into the mundane. I could write that no life is so mundane that it lacks creativity, struggle, and drama. Alternatively, I could write that the mundane is all there is, and it itself is the site of creativity, struggle, and drama. Everyday life is simultaneously humdrum and wonderful. As human life is intentional, so actions cannot be explained as effects of the patterns they themselves create. To explain creative agency is, instead, to understand the reasoning of the agents. It is to attribute to them webs of belief and desire in the light of which the actions seem reasonable. It is also to locate the relevant beliefs against the background of traditions and dilemmas that make them too seem reasonable. In this way, to understand other people is to reconstruct their worlds. Even when we are skeptical of people’s self-​understanding, we make sense of them as situated agents by reconstructing their beliefs and desires and the traditions that influence them. This reconstruction has both rational and empathetic aspects. The rational aspect need not show others to be self-​reflective and consistent, let alone correct, but it does involve postulating conceptually intelligible connections among their beliefs, desires, and actions. The empathetic aspect does not require psychologically reliving others’ experiences and feelings, but it does involve fellow-​feeling, human warmth, and even compassion with people’s difficulties and foibles. This compassion does not involve a false sentimentality; it does not gloss people and their actions in soft hues. It is, rather, a product of wisdom, recognizing that people are muddling through. Everyone is trying to get by in their specific historical contexts. Some actions might be successful and just, others might not. In either case, however, the success and justice are properties of the actions more than the actors. Compassionate narratives seek less to judge people than to understand how they, in their contexts, tried to deal with the unpredictable meaninglessness of life. The narratives explore the webs of meaning and action by which people try to cobble together practices and so tame fate. These narratives treat people as agents grappling with contexts in the absence of correct ways forward. Self-​reflexivity implies our own lives are those of historically situated agents. We too are temporary appearances in natural historical processes. Equally, our intentionality means that we too act for reasons of our own and that we too can reflect on our actions. We can try to understand ourselves better by attributing beliefs and desires to ourselves, perhaps even unconscious ones, and by reflecting on the historical traditions against the background of which we adopted

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those beliefs. We can be modest in what we judge to be our successes, gentle on what we judge to be our failings. Finally, we too can look for the extraordinary within everyday life with its moments of humor, joy, and sadness. The world is magical not because it contains metaphysical meaning but because we find it so. After God, there is the extraordinary quotidian natural world of which our human lives are but a small part.

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Index absence 76–​77, 82, 83, 90, 91, 97, 141, 200 actions 13, 125–​129, 170, 174–​175, 238, 244, 245 See also agency; practices acquaintance 2 aesthetic theory 53–​54, 78–​79, 87 agency 10, 16, 29, 30, 43, 95, 117, 118–​124, 125–​131, 148, 214–​216 See also actions; situated agency alterity See other Althusser, Louis 55–​56, 57–​58, 62, 118 analytic philosophy 13–​14, 18–​24, 234 anthropology, structural 54–​55, 56 anti-​essentialism 114, 175 anti-​rationalism 42, 44, 106, 107 anti-​realism 107–​115, 116, 175 Aragon, Louis 80 art 36, 53–​54, 78–​79 association 55 authenticity 86, 87, 88, 89, 213 authorship 117, 142, 143–​145, 208 automatic writing 80, 81 autonomy 16, 18, 29, 40, 42, 44, 95, 121, 122, 123–​124, 127, 137, 159 avant-​garde 6, 8, 15, 24, 69–​91, 160, 164–​ 165, 205–​207, 213, 221 See also Dada; situationism; surrealism  Bachelard, Gaston 7, 58 Bacon, Francis 34–​35 Ball, Hugo 80 Balzac, Honoré de 70 Baudelaire, Charles 79, 87 Baudrillard, Jean 4, 6, 8, 69, 85, 86–​87, 88–​ 89, 90, 206, 207, 220 Barthes, Roland  on the body 70–​71, 72 on concepts 176 criticism of Sartre 78, 80 influence of avant-​garde on 8, 78 on language 117 links with Tel Quel 78 Mythologies 60 as a poststructuralist 6, 67 structuralism and 7, 46–​47 on texts and meaning 16, 59–​61, 68, 70–​ 71, 139, 141

Bataille, Georges 80–​82, 85, 87 Being 186–​192 beliefs  community and 207–​208 context and 20, 120, 121–​123, 207–​208 distorted beliefs 179–​181 empirical beliefs 198–​199 ethical beliefs 198–​199, 200, 203–​204 genealogy and 170, 172, 174–​175, 176–​178 intentionality and 125–​127, 129, 130 justified beliefs 197–​198 lived practice and 13 postfoundationalism and 5 practices and 149 proper beliefs 179–​181 radical historicism and 170 rationality and 131–​136, 245 traditions and 24, 156–​159, 238–​240 webs of 16, 17, 21–​23, 24, 27, 29, 30, 116, 122, 130, 132, 134, 142, 151, 155–​159, 163, 201 Berlin, Isaiah 236 Bichat, Marie Xavier 59 biology 36, 37 Blanchot, Maurice 81–​83, 91 body, the 70–​71, 72, 86, 88 Breton, André 80 bricolage 62 Broussais, Francois 59 Canguilhem, Georges 58 canons 146–​147 capitalism 55, 56, 57, 84, 85, 86 Carnap, Rudolf 234 Carpenter, W. S. 143 Church, Alonzo 64 Classical era 34–​37 classifications 239, 242 Coleridge, Samuel 233 Collingwood, R. G. 235, 236 communitarianism 209–​210, 226 community 18, 82, 83, 205–​227, 241–​242 compassion 240, 241, 245 Comte, August 42, 166 concepts 19–​23, 95, 99–​101, 104, 114, 115, 116, 130, 175–​178

256 Index conduct 119–​120 confession 24 consciousness 63, 64, 71–​72, 103–​105, 117, 119, 179–​180, 181, 238 consistency 131–​135 context 20–​21, 119–​120, 121–​123, 127, 151, 155, 156, 163–​164, 207–​208 contingency 167–​168 correlations 239, 242 cosmopolitanism 17, 185–​197, 199, 203, 221, 241–​242 creativity 16, 35, 36, 40 critique 163–​183, 184–​185 Croce, Bernedtto 165, 166 culture 194–​195 Dada 69, 79–​81, 84, 85 Darwin, Charles 40 Debord, Guy 84, 85 decentering 139, 145–​147, 150–​151, 152, 159, 170–​171, 194–​195 Declaration of Independence 221 deconstruction 1, 17, 20, 61, 67, 74, 77, 101–​ 102, 139, 141–​142, 145, 170, 182–​183, 185, 186, 219–​220, 237 deliberation 223–​225 democracy 75, 76, 177, 219–​225, 242–​244 Derrida, Jacques  avant-​garde and 8, 24, 77–​78, 90–​91 on Blanchot 83 cosmopolitanism of 195–​197 deconstruction 1, 17, 20, 61, 67, 74, 77, 101–​102, 139, 141–​142, 145, 170, 182–​183, 185, 186, 219–​220, 237 “Eating Well” 10 on ethics 1–​3, 72–​77, 91, 185–​196, 199–​ 200, 203, 205 Foucault and 62–​63, 72, 83, 87, 90 Of Grammatology 10 on Heidegger 186–​196, 199 on hospitality 218–​219 on humanism 137–​138 on Husserl 16, 63–​64, 65, 102–​107 on justification 205 on knowledge 16 honorary degree for 18–​19 on Levinas 83 links with Tel Quel 78, 85

on meaning 10, 20, 21, 61, 74, 76–​77, 96–​107, 141 on philosophical language 1–​3, 7, 18–​19 on politics 219–​220, 221 “The Politics of Friendship” 83 as a poststructuralist 4, 6 on presence 108–​109, 117 metaphysics and 1–​3, 4, 13, 28, 205, 237 responses to criticism of 9–​12 on Saussure 61–​62, 63, 96–​102, 103, 141 Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question 186–​195 structuralism and 7, 61–​67, 76, 96, 125 style of 18–​19, 20–​21, 22, 23, 24 on texts 128, 129, 139, 141–​142, 185 on truth 102–​107 Descartes, René 35 desires 86, 125–​127, 245 determinism 151–​152, 158, 160, 166 developmental historicism 166–​167, 170, 233–​234, 235–​236, 237 diachronic historical analyses 51–​52, 153, 173 différance 65–​66, 69, 74, 77, 97, 125, 141–​ 142, 205 difference 185, 186, 194, 199, 207, 213 dilemmas 16, 24, 157–​158, 245 of knowledge 15, 28, 40, 43–​44, 46, 56, 57, 59, 60–​61, 67, 68, 69, 90, 95, 163–​ 164, 226 of subjectivity 15, 28, 46, 56, 59, 60, 67, 68, 69, 90, 95, 117–​138, 163–​164, 226 traditions and 140, 157–​158 Dilthey, Wilhelm 165, 166 discourse 152, 153–​154, 158 disease 58 diversity 185–​186, 207 Durkheim, Émile 42–​43 economics 36, 37 See also Neoclassical economics empiricism 34–​35, 39, 40, 43, 234 empowerment 211–​212, 213, 222, 225, 226 See also power epistemes 28–​29, 31–​32, 38, 57, 147, 148, 173 eschatology 39, 40 ethics 163–​227 critique and 163–​183, 184 death of God and 5

Index Derrida on 1–​3, 72–​77, 91, 185–​196, 199–​ 200, 203, 205 historicism and 163–​164, 240–​244 humanism and 163–​164, 240–​244 language and 199–​200, 205 vs. morality 216–​217 normativity and 197–​202 postfoundationalism and 184–​186, 197, 200, 206–​207 postmodernism and 185–​186 poststructuralism and 70–​77 ethnology 41 evolutionary epistemology 44 evolution, theory of 40, 43, 233–​234 excess 70, 78, 79, 86 exegesis 9–​12 existentialism 122 experience 5 expertise 134, 242–​243 explanations  formal 154–​155, 158, 166 vs. ontology 156–​157 rational 155 social 152–​159 fellowship 206, 207–​212, 226, 242 Fichte, Johann 42 formal explanations 154–​155, 158, 166 Formalists 53 Foucault, Michel  on agency 10, 30, 118–​124, 148 Althusser’s influence on 57–​58 archaeological approach of 15, 28–​32, 46, 58–​59, 71–​72, 108, 118, 139, 140, 147, 158, 160, 165, 169, 173 on authorship 208 on autonomy 16, 29 avant-​garde and 8, 77–​78, 83, 85, 86, 90 The Birth of the Clinic 58 on the body vs. the soul 72 criticisms of 9–​12, 218 on critique 164 debt to structuralism 7, 57–​59, 61, 67, 68, 165, 173 Derrida and 62–​63, 72, 83, 85, 87, 90 Discipline and Punish 173 on discourse 153–​154 on ethics 216, 217, 218

257 on freedom 206, 207, 217 genealogical approach of 147, 158, 165, 169, 170, 172, 173, 174, 175, 182, 236 The History of Sexuality 10–​11 links with Tel Quel 78, 85 on knowledge 30, 36–​37, 59 Madness and Civilization 71–​72, 75 The Order of Things 10, 15, 16, 27–​32, 36–​ 41, 46, 57, 58, 117, 118, 140, 169 on politics 220 as a poststructuralist 4, 6 on power 72, 83–​84, 85, 88, 147–​148, 150–​ 151, 153–​154, 158, 213–​215 on practices 147–​148 on reality 97 on reason 30–​31, 44 on Sartre 122 on situationism 87–​88 on transgression 87, 217–​218, 227 foundationalism 5, 8–​10, 12, 15, 151, 158, 232 fragmentation 70, 78, 80 freedom 10, 28, 34, 36, 40, 43–​44, 122–​ 123, 137, 163–​164, 199, 205–​206, 207, 216, 217 free will 33 Frege, Gottlob 19 Freud, Sigmund 55, 57, 135 friendship 82, 83, 186, 194, 197 Gadamer, Hans-​Georg 235, 236 game theory 235 gender 178 genealogy 17, 147, 165, 169–​178, 181–​182, 227 geometry 63–​64 globalization 242 God, death of 4–​5, 198, 200, 231, 244 Göedel, Kurt 64 grammatology 62 Greimas, A. J. 59 Hegel, G. W. F. 42, 123–​124, 166, 231, 233, 237 Heidegger, Martin  Being and Time 187 Derrida on 65, 73, 186–​196, 199 Introduction to Metaphysics 187, 188, 189, 191 “Language in the Poem” 188 on metaphysics 4, 187, 188, 189, 191

258 Index Heidegger, Martin (cont.) “The Question Concerning Technology” 192 Rectoral Address of 1933 187, 188, 189 on spirit 186–​195 on the turn to history 40 Herder, Johann Gottfried von 36 historical linguistics 48 historical ontology 174–​168, 182 historicism 165–​169, 231–​246 developmental 166–​167, 170, 233–​234, 235–​236, 237 ethics and 240–​244 modernist 235–​236 philosophy and 236–​240 postfoundational 1, 8–​9, 12, 15, 17, 28–​32, 44, 96, 139, 159–​160, 169, 186, 226–​227, 231–​246 radical 167–​168, 169–​174, 175, 182–​183, 234, 237, 241 structuralists’ hostility to 11 historiography 233–​234 Hobbes, Thomas 35 Leviathan 130 holism, meaning See meaning holism hospitality 190–​193, 194, 197, 218–​219 humanism 231–​246 definitions of 136–​138 ethics and 240–​244 philosophy and 236–​240 postfoundational 1, 8–​9, 12, 15, 17, 28–​32, 44, 96, 139, 154–​156, 159–​160, 163, 179–​ 183, 186, 199, 217–​218, 226–​227, 231–​246 reason and 29 Renaissance humanism 32–​33 structuralists’ hostility to 11, 66 human sciences 27, 28, 32–​44, 136, 139–​160, 168–​169, 234–​235, 239–​241 Humboldt, Wilhelm von 233 Hume, David  Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion 172 Husserl, Edmund 2, 5, 7, 16, 63–​64, 65, 73, 74, 102–​107, 186, 234 The Origin of Geometry 63–​64 idealism 233–​234 identity 185, 190, 193–​194, 210, 212–​213, 217–​ 218, 226, 242

identity politics 17 ideologies 146–​147, 171 ideology critique 179–​183 Iliad 144 individualism 207, 209, 210 influence 214–​216 institutions 238, 151–​152 intentionality 117, 125–​131, 142, 143, 148, 149, 151, 152, 154, 160, 166, 180, 213, 245 interpretation 4–​9, 155 intuitions 201–​202, 204, 221–​222 irrationality 43–​44, 180 See also rationality Jakobson, Roman 54 Janco, Marcel 79 justice 75, 76, 205 justification 197–​198, 205 Kant, Immanuel 19, 39, 164, 231 knowledge 95–​116 in the Classical era 35 democracy and 223 as a dilemma 15, 28, 40, 43–​44, 46, 56, 57, 59, 60–​61, 67, 68, 69, 90, 95, 163–​ 164, 226 foundationalist ideas of 9–​10 Foucault on 30, 36–​37, 38, 39, 59 language and 96–​97 language-​games and 89 local knowledge 134 objective knowledge 12–​13, 29–​30, 40, 42, 104–​107, 197–​198 postmodernism and 16 reasonable knowledge 30 See also meaning; truth Lacan, Jacques 6, 7, 41, 43, 55, 56, 57, 58, 61, 68, 135 language  Being and 187, 189, 190, 192 ethics and 199–​200, 205 German language 189 intentionality and 125–​128 knowledge and 96–​97 langue 48–​51, 53, 54, 55, 56, 58, 60, 65, 66, 68, 95, 98, 99, 119, 131 meaning and 81–​82, 95, 96–​102, 238 postmodernism and 6

Index power and 83–​84 rationality and 131–​133 self and 127–​128, 131–​132, 135 See also linguistics; philology; signifieds; signifiers; signs; texts language games 89 language, philosophical 1–​3, 7, 12, 18–​19, 22 langue 48–​51, 53, 54, 55, 56, 58, 60, 65, 66, 68, 95, 98, 99, 119, 131 Lawrence, D. H. 44 Levinas, Emmanuel 73–​75, 81, 82, 83 Lévi-​Strauss, Claude 7, 41, 43, 54–​55, 56, 57, 58, 62 liberal universalism 195–​197, 204 liberation theory 123 life 4, 231–​232, 236–​237, 240, 243, 244–​246 linguistics  historical linguistics 48 langue 48–​51, 53, 54, 55, 56, 58, 60, 65, 66, 68, 95, 98, 99, 119, 131 parole 49–​49, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 60, 65, 66, 68, 76, 98, 118, 119, 131 structural linguistics 41, 46–​53, 56, 59–​ 61, 68 See also language literary analysis 37–​38 literature, structural approaches to 53–​ 54, 56 lived practice 3, 4, 12–​13 local knowledge 134 local reasoning 134–​135, 137, 139, 140, 159, 160, 167, 213, 242, 244 Locke, John 35 Two Treatises of Government 143, 145 logic 64–​65 logical empiricism 234 logocentrism 66–​67 Lovejoy, A. O. 108 Lyotard, Jean-​François 4, 6, 8, 69, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 90, 164, 185, 203, 206, 207, 208, 220, 232 madness 71–​72, 75, 83, 88 Maistre, Joseph de 233 Man, concept of 28–​29, 30, 32, 35–​44, 95 Marcuse, Herbert 123 Marxism 39–​40, 57, 85, 118, 179, 233–​234 Marx, Karl 42, 58, 84, 164, 166

259 mathematics, philosophy of 63–​65 meaning  definitions of 140 Derrida on 10, 20, 21, 61, 74, 76–​77, 96–​ 107, 141 instability/​stability of 65–​66, 70, 96–​ 102, 141 language and 81–​82, 95, 96–​102, 238 relational theory of 103–​105, 108, 116 structural linguistics and 60, 61 texts and 16, 21, 70–​71, 139, 140–​147, 159–​160 traditions and 238–​239 See also knowledge; truth meaning holism 3, 4, 12, 13–​14, 15, 17, 20–​23, 122–​123, 155–​156, 163 Meinecke, Friedrich 165, 166 medicine, history of 58, 59 metaphysics 1–​3, 4, 12–​13, 28, 82, 186–​193, 194, 195, 205, 231–​232 See also metaphysics Mill, John Stuart 233 Mirandola, Pico della  Oration 33 models 239, 242 modernism 234–​235 modern thought 14–​15, 27–​45, 95, 160, 163, 166, 233–​236 Moore, G. E. 234 morality 173, 201–​202, 216–​217 moral responsibility 17, 203 myths 54–​55, 56, 57, 60 Nancy, Jean-​Luc 137 narrative explication 21–​22 narratives 20 naturalism 113 natural sciences 240–​241 natural world 244–​246 nature 34, 35, 40, 42, 43 Nazism 186, 188–​189 Neoclassical economics 234–​235, 242 Newton, Isaac 35 Nietzsche, Friedrich 4, 41–​42, 44, 88, 124, 170, 172–​173, 231–​232, 234 Beyond Good and Evil 173 On the Genealogy of Morals 173, 181–​182 nihilism 197–​198, 200, 201

260 Index normative analysis 184, 185 normativity 197–​202, 203–​204 objectivity 64, 104–​107, 168, 197–​198 ontology  historical 174–​178, 182 social 114, 147–​152, 156–​157, 167, 170, 174 organizations 209, 210, 221, 222–​223 other 17, 41, 73–​74, 75–​76, 81, 82, 90, 91, 185, 186, 190–​191, 194–​197, 199, 205 parole 49–​49, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 60, 65, 66, 68, 76, 98, 118, 119, 131 phenomenology 2, 16, 39–​40, 63, 64, 74, 103, 104, 234 philology 36, 37–​38 philosophical language See language, philosophical philosophy 236–​240 Pinel, Phillipe 59 play 70, 78, 80, 85 pleasure 70–​71, 72, 86 poetry 53–​54 police 214 politics 219–​225 Popper, Karl 44 positivism 39, 40, 42, 157, 166, 233–​234 postfoundational historicism 8–​9, 12, 15, 17, 28–​32, 44, 96, 139, 159–​160, 169, 186, 226–​227, 231–​246 postfoundational humanism 1, 8–​9, 12, 15, 17, 28–​32, 44, 96, 139, 154–​156, 159–​160, 163, 179–​183, 186, 199, 217–​218, 226–​227, 231–​246 postfoundationalism  community and 206–​219 cosmopolitanism and 193–​195 critique and 17 definition of 5 democracy and 221–​225 differences within 4 ethics and 184–​186, 197, 200, 206–​207 identity and 217–​218 meaning holism and 14 style of 18, 24 webs of belief and 27 postfoundational universalism 196–​197 postmodernism 

avant-​garde and 6, 8, 15, 69–​91, 160, 164–​ 165, 205–​207, 213, 221 definition of 6–​9 democracy and 223 ethics and 160, 185–​186 knowledge and 16 language and 6, 12 meaning holism and 4 pragmatism and 5 rejection of foundationalism by 12, 232 rejection of metaphysics by 232 responses to criticism of 9–​12 responses to subjectivity 16 within modern thought 27–​45 See also names of postmodern authors poststructuralism  avant-​garde and 8 definition of 6–​9 poststructuralist ethics 70–​77 relation to structuralism 46, 62–​63, 65–​ 68, 117, 151, 152–​154 See also names of poststructuralist authors power  avant garde and 206, 207 body and 86 critical theorists on 171 Foucault on 72, 83–​84, 85, 88, 90, 147–​ 148, 150–​151, 153–​154, 158, 213–​215 revolution and 87 See also empowerment practices  beliefs and 149 definition of 160 genealogy and 170, 172 meaning holism and 20, 21 postfoundational historicism and 17 radical historicism and 170 social practices 60, 146–​147, 150–​151, 159, 238 vs. structures 148–​150, 151, 152, 159 See also actions Prague Linguistic Circle 53–​54, 56 pragmatism 5 presence 16, 75, 77, 82, 108–​109, 117 prisons 214 private property 212 progressive writing 78 propositions 108

Index psycho-​analysis 41, 55, 135–​136 psychology 36, 37, 41 quasi-​metaphysics 20, 21, 24, 76, 77, 82, 90, 91 quasi-​structuralism 44, 66, 76, 77, 118–​119, 131, 135, 147, 148, 160 Quine, W. V. O. 64–​65, 66 race 178 racism 186, 188–​191, 192, 195 radical historicism 167–​168, 169–​174, 175, 182–​183, 234, 237, 241 rational choice 235 rational explanation 155 rationality 117, 123–​124, 131–​136, 180 See also irrationality realism 108–​114, 130–​131, 175 See also anti-​realism reality 89, 97 reason 5, 16, 21, 29, 30–​31, 34, 39, 42 See also local reasoning Rée, Paul 172 Reich, Wilhelm 123 reification 151–​152, 158, 160, 166, 176–​177, 194 relativism 168, 171 religion 200–​201, 231 See also God, death of Renaissance, The 32–​33, 35, 36, 136 responsibility 75–​77, 195, 199, 205 ressentiment 181 revolution 87 Romanticism 35, 40, 42, 43, 44, 78–​79, 233 ruptures 58 Russell, Bertrand 2, 234 Saint-​Simon Henri de 42 Sartre, Jean-​Paul 6, 7, 8, 40, 43, 63, 78, 80, 81–​82, 122, 236 Saussure, Ferdinand de  Course in General Linguistics 47–​53, 102 Derrida on 61–​62, 63, 96–​102, 103, 141 influence on Barthes 7, 59 influence on Foucault 7, 41, 57 influence on Lacan 7, 43, 55 influence on Lévi-​Strauss 43, 54–​55 on meaning 96–​102, 141 on social facts 42–​43 structural linguistics and 47–​53, 65, 68, 102, 118

261 Schelling, Friedrich 42 Schopenhauer, Arthur 42, 44 scientism 241 self 127–​128, 131–​132, 135, 207–​208, 211 self-​creation 217–​218 semiology 59–​61, 62, 70–​71 sexuality 123 signifieds 49–​50, 51, 56, 60, 61, 62, 66–​67, 76, 97–​102, 103, 141 signifiers 49–​50, 51, 55, 56, 60, 61, 62, 66–​67, 88, 97–​102, 120–​121, 128, 141 signs 49–​57, 59–​62, 66–​67, 76, 85, 88, 96, 97–​102, 128, 139, 151–​152, 163 situated agency  autonomy and 122, 123, 124, 127, 137 community and 206, 208, 212–​215, 227 cosmopolitanism and 199 decentering and 194–​195 Foucault and 158 intentionality and 119 power and 151 psycho-​analysis and 136 reasoning and 119, 134, 163, 167, 238, 244–​245 structuralism and 95, 160 traditions and 16, 139–​140, 157, 159, 160 situationism 69, 79, 83, 84–​85, 87–​88 Situationist International 84 skepticism 35 Smith, Adam 35 social constructivism 113–​114, 174, 175, 238–​239 social democracy 17, 44 social explanation 152–​159 social facts 42–​43 Socialisme ou Barbarie 85, 87 social life 112–​115, 125–​126, 159–​160, 209, 210, 238–​240, 244–​246 social objects 174, 175 social ontology 114, 147–​152, 156–​157, 167, 170, 174 social practices 60, 146–​147, 150–​151, 159, 238 social relations 150–​151, 200, 218, 238 society 34 sociology 36, 37, 41 solidity 80–​81 soul, the 72 sovereignty 80–​81

262 Index spectacle 84–​85, 86, 87, 89, 90 speech 98, 102 See also parole Spencer, Herbert 166, 234 spirit 186–​195 structuralism 46–​68 agency and 118 Derrida’s criticism of 7, 16, 61–​67, 76, 96, 125 Foucault’s debt to 7, 27, 57–​59, 61, 67, 68, 165, 173 historicism and 11, 166 humanism and 66 literature and 53–​54, 56 poststructuralism and 7, 46, 62–​63, 65–​ 68, 139, 151, 152–​154 psycho-​analysis and 55, 56 as a scientific approach 57, 61, 160 structural anthropology 54–​55, 56 structural linguistics 15, 41, 46–​53, 56, 59–​61, 68 See also quasi-​structuralism structures 148–​150, 151, 152, 159, 238 style 18–​24 subjectivity 117–​138 vs. the body 71, 72, 86, 88 as a dilemma 15, 28, 46, 56, 59, 60, 67, 68, 69, 90, 95, 117–​138, 163–​164, 226 foundationalist ideas of 9–​10 the other and 73, 81 postmodern responses to 16, 89 surrealism 69, 79, 80–​82, 83, 84, 85 synchronic structural analyses 51–​52, 152, 173 Tawney, R. H. 212 Tel Quel 78, 85 texts  authorship and 117, 142, 143–​145, 208

definitions of 140 Derrida on 128, 129, 139, 141–​142, 185 meanings and 16, 21, 70–​71, 130, 139, 140–​ 147, 159–​160 See also deconstruction traditions 156–​159 beliefs and 24, 156–​159, 163, 245 dilemmas and 28, 140, 163 community and 207–​208 decentering and 146–​147 identity and 217–​218 meanings and 238–​239 social concepts and 114 situated agency and 16, 139–​140, 157, 159, 160 Trakl, Georg 188 transcendentalism 39, 40 transgression 78, 79, 80, 85, 87, 89, 90, 217–​ 218, 227 Troeltsch, Ernst 165, 166 truth 10, 16, 28, 88, 89, 96, 102–​107, 130–​131, 168, 171, 197–​198 See also knowledge; meaning unintended consequences 149–​150 unity 80 universalism 184–​204 Vaneigem, Raoul 85 violence 214–​216, 221, 222 virtue 33 welfare 211–​212, 213, 221, 222, 225, 226 Wilde, Oscar 79 wine 176 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 3, 5, 66, 106 writing 78, 80, 81, 98–​99, 102, 103, 141