Showing papers in "Substance in 1997"

Bourdieu and Common Sense

Abstract: roots go back to the Greek terms koinos nous (common mind-the mental equipment we all, presumably, bear), koine aisthesis (common perceptual sense, on which I will elaborate below), and koine ennoia (common notions, beliefs or ideas). The Latin term sensus communis uneasily combines all these senses, a fact that accounts perhaps for some of the continuing vagueness of its definitions (Bugter 83-84). In one form or another, the phrase has never gone out of use, but as a result of its complex history, it does seem at times to carry contradictory meanings. Sometimes common sense is that plain feet-on-the-ground sense of reality available to any clear-thinking person, which can emerge when all the fancy talk of the so-called experts is swept away. Alternatively, common sense is quite the opposite: that collection of provincial, conventional wisdom, superstition, and false consciousness that can be recognized as such and overcome through rigorous thought, rationality, and science. Does common sense refer to those universal properties of mind, rationality, and sense that all humans have in common? Or does it signify the fact that we are all members of particular and specific social and historical communities of sense and knowledge?' It is instructive to note that while Samuel Johnson's famous kick at a stone has long been understood as a defense of common sense against Berkeley's philosophy, Berkeley himself understood his own philosophical work to be a defense of common sense. While skeptical commonsense thinking, with its ability to debunk and demystify, found Enlightenment defenders and champions from Descartes to Voltaire to Thomas Reid, a concurrent strain of philosophical inquiry-sometimes including the same thinkers-understood common sense itself to be that body of received ideas that must be overcome by means of skeptical philosophical reflection. More recently, G.E. Moore has explored the articulation of common sense in ordinary language, while Chomsky's work has occasioned a related debate on the idea of common notions and innate knowledge. An excellent

Of Stones, Angels and Humans: Michel Serres and the Global City

Abstract: The cover of Atlas reproduces a Winkel projection of a planisphere; it shows a nocturnal view of the orbis terrarum (fictive since night is not simultaneous around the planet), where the oecumene appears, like an upside down sky, as an immense galaxy made of all the lights of the cities of the world. The inhabited space is now dominated by urban megalopolises; increasingly, the human species seems to be concentrated in cities. Global space appears as the archipelago of the cities of the earth. The planet becomes a city. Arnold Toynbee already had a foreboding that this was the major event of current civilization since the Industrial Revolution. He called this planetary megalopolis Oecumenopolis. However, Toynbee's vision still belonged to the nineteenth century, inasmuch as he saw this extension as a proliferation of the industrial city and its metamorphoses, and of the infinite and boring suburbs that today surround these metropolises everywhere or indeed actually constitute most of them. In reality, in this invasion of the urban form, there is more at stake than the city; this transformation of the ways of inhabiting the city is not simply about the extension of the built environment and population management. Something very different is happening on multiple levels. This is what Michel Serres helps us to understand. He does so without having written explicitly about the urban question, not even in Rome, the Book of Foundations. Nevertheless, it is present in his work everywhere, but in the context of numerous other questions. One of the chapters of Angels, a Modern Myth is called "Los Angeles." It contains no analysis of the urban problems of the Californian metropolis; rather it is the extension of a reflection on global space as a worldwide network of messages, as a space filled with angels, figures of a plural Hermes. The journey from Rome to Los Angeles is in fact a journey that goes from questions of foundations to questions of relations, both being intertwined. These are important questions, which include many others, and pervade all of Serres's work: the relations between local and global, be

The itinerant theorist : Nature and knowledge/ecology and topology in Michel Serres

Abstract: Designant M. Serres comme un theoricien itinerant entre les differents modeles de la connaissance qui unfient l'homme et le monde, l'A. etudie la conception de l'ecologie developpee par Serres dans le sens d'une fusion du langage et de la representation, de l'etre et de la connaissance, d'une part, et dans le sens pratique d'une certaine interdisciplinarite, d'autre part. Examinant la topologie de Melville et d'Olson, Serres defend une perspective globale qui ouvre la voie a une eco-pedagogie et un contrat culturel

Writing that matters

Abstract: Etude des intersections entre la litterature et la philosophie etablies par M. Serres a partir de la connexion entropie-information qui definit la connaissance scientifique, d'une part, et a partir de l'analogie entre les formes et les pratiques du connaitre (scientifique, narrative, discursive), d'autre part. Soulevant la question des relations asymetriques entre l'auteur et le lecteur, l'A. montre que la defense ethique de la culture humaniste chez M. Serres invite l'individu a accomplir ce qu'il a appris par son education et son intelligence

The End of the Reign of the Book

Abstract: Roger Chartier is perhaps the most important French scholar working on the history of the book today. In his many books and essays on reading and print culture in Renaissance, seventeenth-, and eighteenth-century Europe, he has sought to demonstrate the importance of combining reception theory with the study of physical text forms. The present essay, which appeared in Le Monde on June 9, 1995, reflects Chartier's interest in bringing this critical methodology to bear on a rather urgent problem in contemporary culture: the rise of the electronic text. In this regard, Chartier's work must be set against the trend in American criticism which, for better or for worse, sees the electronic text as a radical break with the past. For him, the emergence of the digital text is simply the latest stage in a continuum of media that have served as supports for the written word. To essentialize or romanticize any individual part of that continuum is to miss the point. Instead, he suggests, the focus of critics should be on the institutions engendered by new text technologies, and on the strategies readers adopt to make sense of them. Eric D. Friedman University of California, Irvine

Resisting Memories: The Creole Identities of Lafcadio Hearn and Edouard Glissant

Abstract: THE APPARENT SWING AWAY FROM AN ESSENTIALIST IDENTITY politics in recent discussions of colonial and postcolonial identity, and toward a vision of cultural hybridity that destabilizes any and all such identitarian markers, has resulted in a heightened interest in "that process of mutation and adaptation we call creolization," as Paul Gilroy puts it (Small Acts, 209). This is a process that the Caribbean poet Kamau Brathwaite, following in the footsteps of Cuba's Fernando Ortiz, began theorizing in the early 1970s in his various studies of how, even at the height of slavery, white and black Jamaicans were creating and participating in a common culture. Just as the Creole languages of the Caribbean, spoken by white and black alike, were born out of the mixing of European and African languages, so too did the existence of this creolized culture hold out the possibility for Brathwaite of going beyond what Edward Said has called "fixed ideas of settled identity and culturally authorized definition" (225). Creolization offers a response to the manichean tendencies of colonial discourse-tendencies to which, moreover, "Third World" theorists eager to dissociate themselves from the sort of existential complicities that were an inevitable result of colonial practice, if not of segregationist colonial theory, all too easily fell prey. It has thus taken its place in the postcolonial lexicon, alongside "transculturation," "hybridity," "mongrelization," and the like, all of which anticipate the final collapse of the binary rhetoric of "us" and "them," which is clearly no longer adequate to the complex realities of what Gilroy has called "our transnational post-contemporary circumstances" (ibid., 193-4). What I propose to do here is look at two opposed but nonetheless genealogically-related visions of the creolization process, one

Words and Moods: The Transference of Literary Knowledge

Abstract: THE EPIGRAPHS CHOSEN TO INTRODUCE THIS ESSAY on literary transference posit the existence of unspoken or wordless worlds, unformulated inner spaces that we cannot access directly, but that nonetheless shape us and form part of our utterances. Tracing the formation of such spaces back to early infancy, Christopher Bollas argues that the modes in which an infant is received and cared for, and the ways in which its earliest sensory experiences are stimulated and organized, establish a "grammar of being" that precedes the acquisition of language. Even after the symbolic order of language is put into play, this early "grammar" retains its force, inhabiting language as an unspoken dimension, or, as Bollas calls it, an "unthought known." This spatial conception of language and knowledge suggests that what we commonly refer to as a person's "inner space" is transposed into an "inner space" of language and thus accessible to communication. The following essay explores the role of literature in fashioning such inner spaces and wordless worlds. Two guiding questions will orient the discussion: How does literature use words to evoke a wordless world, thus drawing it into the realm of intersubjective exchange and communication? And how does literature mediate an "unthought knowledge" of this wordless world? Drawing on Bollas's theory of the unthought known, these questions expand my earlier theoretical reflections on the function of literature and reading. In Subjects without Selves, I develop a theory of the transitional space of literature, arguing that one of the main functions and effects of reading consists in continually redrawing the boundaries of subjectivity

Contingency and the Enlightenment

Abstract: Etude de la position de M. Serres face a la critique postmoderne de l'ideologie rationaliste des philosophes des Lumieres, representee par Foucault, Baudrillard et Lyotard. A l'idee d'un chemin necessaire chez Descartes et a l'ensemble de la methode cartesienne, M. Serres oppose la notion de randonnee comme espace contingent et complexe, qui s'inscrit dans l'heritage de la conception experimentale de la physique developpee par Diderot dans son traite «De l'interpretation de la nature», d'une part, et qui trouve sa meilleure illustration dans le chemin aleatoire qu'emprunte «Jacques le fataliste», d'autre part

Deconstructing Anti-Realism: Quantum Mechanics and Interpretation Theory

Abstract: IN THIS ESSAY I SHALL BE LOOKING AT SOME RECENT (post-1970) developments in philosophy of science that offer a hopeful way forward from the various well-known problems (of meaning-variance, paradigmchange, ontological relativity and the like) bequeathed by logical empiricism. Most promising among them-in my view-is the theory of critical realism that draws inspiration from the work of Rom Harr6 and whose chief exponent during the past two decades has been Roy Bhaskar.1 In North America the emphasis has fallen rather differently, with no such overt or programmatic link between the two major arguments that find expression in the title of Bhaskar's best-known book, Scientific Realism and Human Emancipation. Nevertheless there is a clearly-marked ethical and sociopolitical dimension to the current widespread renewal of interest in causal realism among US philosophers of science. This aspect is important, I shall argue, partly on account of the challenge it offers to the kinds of Kuhnian-relativist thinking that have attained near-orthodox status elsewhere in the social and human sciences.

Outsider Law in Literature: Construction and Representation in Death and the Maiden

Abstract: LITERATURE ALLOWS FOR THE RECOUNTING OF NARRATIVES according to broadly-defined and variously-practiced norms such as character consistency, agential movement, and author-hero relations.' In legal settings, claimants, witnesses and lawyers provide evidence, give summaries, or offer background information according to similar norms, but for dearly defined ends: they are trying to (re-)tell coherent narratives in order to arouse sympathy from the adjudicating body. Even judges recall or recount stories in order to legitimize decisions to the parties of the hearing. But the framework within which legal storytelling occurs demands that the parties abide by an additional set of norms elaborated by members of the legal profession over extended periods of time. These norms are codified, so they are most well known to the initiated (members of the legal profession); they also reflect, to varying degrees, the norms of the society within which the law is practiced, which means that they generally favor members of the ruling or dominant classes of society. Despite the growing popularity of law-literature research and studies, the telling of stories in legal and literary settings has received relatively little attention. I have argued2 in the course of studies on refugee hearings, notably with reference to the work of Marc Angenot, Pierre Bourdieu, Mikhail Bakhtin, Erving Goffman and Teun Van Dijk, that one important relation between literature and law from the storytelling perspective is the process of narrative construction. This process has several components, but for the purposes of this paper two facets will be explored. First, there is the transformation of inner experience into narrative through relations with the other, a process Bakhtin describes as trying to find out "precisely how to accomplish the task of translating myself from inner language into the language of outward expressedness and of weaving all of myself totally into the unitary and pictorial fabric of life as a human being among other

The Self-Conscious Codex: Artists' Books and Electronic Media

Abstract: THE CODEX FORM, CHARACTERIZED BY BOUND SHEETS fixed in a regular sequence of individual pages, has proved durable on account of its efficiency and flexibility through hundreds of years of use. Capable of containing vast amounts of information readily accessed and systematically ordered, it is deceptively simple in form. This apparent simplicity results in part from its familiarity, its pervasive presence in many aspects of historical and contemporary life. With the advent of electronic media, the codex book has become a favorite object in apocalyptic predictions of extinction. Rising printing and paper costs, shortage of storage facilities, and mouthings of ecological concerns over wood-pulp paper consumption have combined with a vision of a book-less library stocked with electronic databases, onscreen search machines, and dazzling innovations superseding the modest capabilities of the tried and true codex book. Warnings against the foolhardiness-and improbability-of the imminent demise of the book as a source of reference and pleasure meet with the same enthusiasm granted the wet-blanket comments of a chaperon at an old fashioned school dance. Sanely speaking, however, it seems sage to consider that in the immediate future the codex book, whatever it may be in the long run, is likely to have a profound effect on the conceptualization of new electronic innovationsand vice-versa. The process by which new forms of information storage, writing practice, and readerly interface will evolve will no doubt transform many of the conventions that have been standard aspects of book production. The excitement which such an interchange generates should not produce an either/or attitude towards electronic and traditional media; rather, emphasis should be put on the service of the conceptual insights that each, by its limitations and possibilities, provides to the other. The question this essay addresses, therefore, is precisely this: how will formal aspects of the traditional codex book be affected by and affect the conceptualization of electronic "books," and vice-versa. To answer such a question requires an initial reflection on the nature of the codex form-both an examination of the structural elements that

Communication: Euphoria, Dysphoria

Abstract: Examinant les origines de la theorie de la communication et de la cybernetique en France en reference a l'ouvrage de P. Breton intitule «L'utopie de la communication» (1992), l'A. montre en quel sens nouveau, metaphorique, M. Serres introduit la notion de communication dans sa lecture des dialogues platoniciens. Soulignant l'existence d'une ideologie de la communication dans «Les chouans» de Balzac, d'une part, et rapprochant M. Serres de P. Virilio, d'autre part, l'A. denonce les dangers de la vitesse a laquelle s'effectuent les echanges d'information en cette fin-de-siecle

The Deleuzian Critique of Pure Fiction

Abstract: Etude de la conception deleuzienne du recit conceptuel a travers la lecture de L'histoire d'autrui dans «Qu'est-ce que la philosophie?». Examinant la question de l'evenement, du concept et de la pensee qui se pose dans le domaine de la narration, l'A. montre que la conception symptomatologique de la litterature moderne developpee par Deleuze et Guattari repose sur la problematique leibnizienne des mondes possibles appliquee au cinema, d'une part, et sur une poetique du chaos, fondee sur le jeu de la difference et de la repetition, et influencee par Borges, d'autre part

Finitude's Score: Essays for the End of the Millennium

Abstract: Suspending the distinction between headline news and high theory, Avital Ronell examines the diverse figures of finitude in our modernity: war, guerrilla video, trauma TV, AIDS, music, divorce, sadism, electronic tagging, rumor. Her essays address such questions as, How do rumors kill? How has video become the conscience of TV? How have the police come to be everywhere, even where they are not? Is peace possible? \"[W]riting to the community of those who have no community--to those who have known the infiniteness of abandonment,\" her work explores the possibility, one possibility among many, that \"this time we have gone too far\" \"One last word. It is possible that we have gone too far. This possibility has to be considered if we, as a species, as a history, are going to get anywhere at all.\

Lacan's Oriental Language of the Unconscious

Abstract: Persuade d'etre mondialement c6l6bre, Lacan voulut avoir le privilege d'une visite privee au Metropolitan: "Dites-leur que je suis Lacan," s'exclama-t-il devant ses trois interlocuteurs m&dus4s. Pamela Tytell resolut le probleme avec un humour trbs "lacanien": elle t6~lphona A l'administrateur de l'opera et lui annonqa que Jean-Paul Sartre voulait venir incognito. Flatt6 de recevoir un h6te aussi prestigieux, celui-ci accepta aussit6t. Pamela lui conseilla simplement, comme s'il s'agissait d'une lubie, de ne pas interpeller le philosophe par son nom. Elle ne put neanmoins eviter que, dans la conversation, fussent demandees des nouvelles de Simone de Beauvoir. Malgre cela, la supercherie ne fut pas d~voilee: Lacan ne comprenait pas suffisamment I'anglais pour la deceler. Quant A Pamela, elle d&ploya tous ses talents de traductrice pour prolonger le quiproquo. (Roudinesco, 1993, 486)

Playing it by the Book

Abstract: AMONG THE MANY EMBATTLED CONSTRUCTS IN OUR CULTURE, the book has been particularly beset in recent years. Assailed from all sides by other forms of expression-television, film, electronic media, and so forth, the book competes more and more unequally in the cultural marketplace. A stroll through any bookstore will confirm that the traditional notion of the book as a vehicle for literature has been challenged from within as well, for even in "good" bookstores the shelf space accorded to fiction, poetry, drama, and essay has shrunk dramatically in the last two decades. After swatting aside calendars, greeting cards, and personalized agenda books, one finds that new kinds of books-books on video, books on audiotapehave prospered, and are displayed prominently. Non-literary genres abound: cookbooks, diet books, and exercise books of dazzling variety tell us how to nourish and sculpt our bodies. Moral guidance from Colin Powell, Rush Limbaugh, and Pope John Paul II is easily found, but should you wish to consult Dostoyevsky, you have to hunt. The imposition of taxes on publishers' inventories has occasioned a stark reduction in the half-life of books: they must be consumed now or go out of print. We are told that reading and writing skills are in decline, that readerly attention spans are dwindling vertiginously (Barth 2); yet-perhaps symptomatically-we don't know whether to "read" that phenomenon as cause or effect. Among the many manifestations of the book's embattlement, I am especially intrigued by the way writers of literature frame that issue and attempt to come to terms with it in their own work. One can undoubtedly identify in any book a discourse, more or less muted, that engages the status of the book itself. Recently however, many writers, responding to the crisis of the book, have amplified that discourse critically and staged it at the center of their work, questioning the theoretical foundations of the construct and proposing new practical models of the book. I would like to discuss three figures in contemporary French literature who seem to me exemplary in this regard. Edmond Jabbs and Jean Echenoz focus on the notion of the book's dimensions, each in his own distinctive fashion, and from different ends of the book's spectrum of possibility. Marcel B~nabou,

Serres translates howe

Abstract: Etude du theme de l'histoire comme processus de traduction et de metamorphose qui apparait dans l'approche stylistique du langage similaire chez M. Serres et S. Howe. Par analogie avec l'essai de M. Serres intitule «Turner traducteur de Carnot» (in «Hermes: Litterature, science, philosophie»), l'A. montre que l'interet pour les transformations dans l'histoire des idees, qui s'articule chez M. Serres autour de la question de la traduction, est un theme isomorphiquement recurrent dans la poesie de S. Howe, marquee par la meme deconstruction de l'ordre du present dans une certaine economie de la production

The Time of Theory

Abstract: longer comes from its harmony with a cosmic order, but from a different harmony: an abstract identity between all individuals. A serious problem must be faced by this society: how to recognize when an event has happened. In order to testify that an event has occurred, you need someone who must be at the same place at the time it occurred, in order to perceive it and then to bear witness to it. But this is not enough. The witness must be socially recognized as a good witness in order for everyone to recognize that the event he has witnessed occurred. In a society no longer founded on the order of the cosmos (and thus on the authority of a priest-king whose testimony is backed by competence and social position), "events" must be democratically validated. But how to avoid the confusion of voices, since no one has the authority to decide the value of a perception, of an aisthesis-to employ the Greek term, for the story actually concerns the Greek cities between the eighth and sixth centuries before Christ. It does not really matter if the individual perception remains in a private domain, but what happens if someone arrives in the agora, yelling that a foreign army is coming? On this kind of occasion, it is important to stop any useless discourses on the validity or non-validity of the perception, and make a decision quickly. Thus it was decided that certain citizens should be chosen, based on good social standing and a reputation for probity, and sent to see what had happened, if indeed something had happened. And until they returned, no one had the right to say anything about the eventuality of what may have happened. As soon as they came back and testified what they had seen, public discussion could legitimately take place. These citizens bore the collective title of theoria-"those who have seen or

Hypertext Hotel Lautreamont

Abstract: THE RECOMBINANT SENSIBILITY, which has come to full expression in modern literature with the maturing of electronic technologies, takes its materials, methods, and media across a threshold to where they become objects for contemplation in themselves. It's a skeptic's sensibility that finds knowledge in the combination of things, and prefers exploring connections among pre-existing materials to building a complete system or total structure. Its foundations might be traced to associationist epistemologies of the eighteenth century,' but its thorough-going embodiment in the technological life-world is new, and distinctively modern. Now that the scene of composition itself can be readily linked by computers and fiberoptic cables to textual material that is ongoing, citable in numerous media, and continuous with the real time of both writing and publication, interactivity becomes the norm, not the exception. The work's environment closes in and takes on a newly literal presence, ensuring that, whatever the book's future, it won't be in isolation from those texts that do not come printed and bound between covers.