Showing papers in "Substance in 2000"

Resistance to Literature

Abstract: Those who refer to literature plain and simple, without the quotation marks designed to suspend the habitual reference of the term, run the risk of losing sight of the present crisis of the paradigm, including the theoretical discourses and disciplinary practices that reveal and intensify that crisis. Among the latter, the practice known as Cultural Studies acquires its place of relevance in close connection with the problematization of the literary text's undecidable nature. Surely, in the expression "literary text," the former term still carries the heavier burden of disputability-and this should not surprise us. Once the phenomenon called "literature" is placed in a secure, undivided, independent, and immune position, the result is a silencing or suspension of the relevant cultural conditions that have situated it as a contingent notion. The flip side to that silence is the exclusion of subaltern spaces, an exclusion generated by a canon founded on a concept of language that is marked in a specific aesthetic sense and contains the power to cover up its own historicity. The most immediate effect of a contingency that wraps itself in secrecy to hide its own dimensions is an elevation of the paradigm to the privileged position of universality. Although, as Garcia Canclini pointed out in a slightly different context, there is no "reason to abandon the

Jacques Ranciere: Literature, Politics, Aesthetics: Approaches to Democratic Disagreement

Abstract: Entretien avec Jacques Ranciere sur les problematiques suivantes : 1) la politique, l'education et l'egalite en democratie ; 2) le changement de paradigme en litterature et critique litteraire ; 3) la logique de la mesentente en politique et en esthetique ; 4) la relation entre politique, esthetique et democratie ; 5) l'opposition entre l'idee et les formes esthetiques.

Bourdieu's Uneasy Psychoanalysis

Abstract: As is known, psychoanalysis, developed in Vienna around the time of the Belle Epoque (1870-1914), would be a form of Eurocentrism universalizing the European psychic structure and its sexual obsessions, further contributing to psychoanalysis's crisis. Nonetheless, it seems to be playing an increasingly important role, no less ambiguous, in the work of Pierre Bourdieu. In fact, psychoanalysis has always had a place in his texts, despite an initial degree of hostility or serious reservations on Bourdieu's part. His reservations, however, have evolved over time, become nuanced and modified, to ultimately assign psychoanalysis a tentative but increasingly distinct profile as a problematic discipline. At times psychoanalysis is viewed as a rival to Bourdieu's sociology, from which the latter must absolutely be differentiated. At others it is seen as a kind of domain (or field) susceptible to annexation through the sociological treatment of certain of its concepts-that is, when a possible fusion with sociology, based on an equal footing and a clearly defined division of labor, appears hopeless. As is also known, since its foundation, sociology has offered its own answers to the questions philosophy has been asking from the very beginning, an observation that Bourdieu would certainly be the last to deny. But in the case of psychoanalysis, as Alain Juranville notes in his remarkable Lacan et la philosophie (1984):

The Gender Relationship in Bourdieu's Sociology

Abstract: Avec son essai La domination masculine, Pierre Bourdieu figure parmi les rares penseurs exterieur aux gender studies a placer la question du genre au coeur de l'interrogation sociologique. Apres avoir montre la pertinence puis les limites de la notion de role social appliquee au genre, l'A. montre en quoi le concept d'habitus elabore par P.Bourdieu permet de rendre compte du caractere construit du genre. Elle montre ensuite comment la notion de violence symbolique complete la comprehension de la domination masculine. Enfin, plus generalement, elle met en lumiere les apports de P. Bourdieu aux gender studies comme a l'etude des relations de genre dans les sciences sociales

Pierre Bourdieu and literature

Abstract: Apres avoir expose les principaux traits distinctifs de la pensee sociologique de Pierre Bourdieu, cet article examine comment ce dernier aborde la question du champ litteraire. Cette notion permet de comprendre comment les creations litteraires sont liees a l'espace social. C'est ainsi que la litterature apparait en France comme jouissant d'un rare prestige, liee aux ecrivains, mais aussi aux grandes institutions culturelles et au marche de l'edition. Les modes d'autonomisation du champ litteraire sont une illustration de l'idee, chere a Bourdieu, du prolongement sur un mode symbolique de certaines luttes pour la domination au sein du champ economique

Habitus, intentionality, and social rules : A controversy between Searle and Bourdieu

Abstract: Bourdieu's sociology contains many concepts and terms that could play a significant role for philosophy. University philosophers are hardly inclined, of course, to accept suggestions from other disciplines, in particular when they carry the scent of empirical research in the everyday world. Their interest lies-apart from a few exceptions, such as Wittgenstein, Merleau-Ponty, and Charles Taylor-beyond the sensory world, directed instead toward the world of pure thought. The mind has no smell; it avoids contact with the corporeal. When philosophers describe society, it is transformed into a product of thought. The absence of sensuality lends intellectual rigor and consistency to their attempts, inasmuch as they trace social structures back to logical ones. In this way philosophy can achieve, at best, clarifications of concepts from which sociology can also benefit. However, this advantage is always obtained at a high price: intellectual construction ignores everything that constitutes society-social practice, power, actions of social agents, their habitus, their position, strategies, and the internal complexities of society itself. The weaknesses and advantages inherent in a logical reconstruction of social processes can be studied in John R. Searle's The Construction of the Social World (1995). Through a critical confrontation of these strengths and weaknesses with Pierre Bourdieu's theory, it becomes clear how this theory actually contributes to a philosophy of society. Searle's publication is the logical continuation of his work on construction, which spans several decades. It leads from his theory of the speech act, via the concept of intentionality, to the "rediscovery of the mind," finally arriving at an "ontology of social facts."' Bourdieu's starting points are his culturalanthropological field research, and empirical sociological studies of traditional and modern societies. In these works, he develops a theory of social action and of a society characterized by power structures.2 Searle transfers an entire field out of the empiricism of sociology into the philosophy of mind, and submits it to an ontological model of hierarchical levels of reality. Bourdieu's aim has long been to dissociate the concept of the social agent from the philosophy of mind. Both Bourdieu and Searle invest a wealth of ideas in their attempt to reorder the respectively opposing discipline

The Ethics of Interpretation and the International Division of Intellectual Labor

Abstract: Much of the work produced in recent years on the relationship between ethics and literature has responded to two major concerns: on the one hand, the possible or desirable role of literature as a source for ethical theory (Nussbaum, Love's Knowledge; Williams; McIntyre) and, on the other, the contribution of ethically-informed perspectives to the understanding of literature (Nussbaum, Love's Knowledge; Booth; Parker; Newton). Philosophers in search of alternative models of ethical agency have found much from which to profit in the examination of literature, especially prose fiction, and in parallel fashion ethically-oriented critics have added a new dimension to their interpretive task by incorporating the philosophical tradition of ethical inquiry, especially the Kantian and post-Kantian. However, on both sides of the disciplinary divide the dialogue with the developments of literary theory in the past decades has been, to say the least, problematic. Viewed with suspicion by both moral philosophers and ethical critics, contemporary literary theory is often cast as responsible for the bracketing of ethical concerns in literary studies. The purpose of this article is to map out this unhappy marriage between ethics and literary theory by inquiring into the conception of ethics entailed by the claim that critical theory has been oblivious to ethical concerns. Since this stems at least partially from a confrontation between various national traditions, philosophical and otherwise, and since ethical issues are increasingly being played out on an international arena, I will recast the problem within what I am calling "the international division of intellectual labor," an asymmetrical and hierarchical distribution of cognitive positions among different countries and regions of the globe. This will be argued primarily through the reading of a story by Jorge Luis Borges, which will place the ethical discussion in a pedagogical context, thus bringing me back to the potential contribution of critical theory to the formulation of an ethics of literary studies responsive to the aforementioned division of labor.

The Sociologist as Moraliste : Pierre Bourdieu's Practice of Theory and the French Intellectual Tradition

Abstract: Pierre Bourdieu is increasingly seen by the media in France and abroad as the new French intellectual star, after Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida In the mid-1990s, Bourdieu became a vocal defender of the unemployed on the streets of Paris and a denouncer of neoliberal economic doctrine, a Sartrean intellectual in the full sense of the term According to most commentators, this shift from the library to the street split Bourdieu's trajectory into one of academic sociologist on the one hand, and public activist on the other Moral values, which seemed absent from Bourdieu's academic work, have taken a central role in his public activism It is true that in his theory, strategies of resistance to the rule of the dominant classes reproduce more than challenge domination, creating a bleak picture of social reality In contrast, in his intellectual activity Bourdieu has practically demonstrated the effectiveness of strategies of resistance to domination and globalization The separation between contemplation and action, theory and practice, the critique of intellectual power and its application, seems too perfect, however Instead of emphasizing these dichotomies, I would like to suggest here that a specific moral outlook unites the young and the old Bourdieu It has always been present in Bourdieu's studies, despite their scientific nature Republican values enabled Bourdieu to switch from a theory of practice to the practice of theory, revealing in the process the ambiguities and contradictions of both his scientific work and political activism Theory needs ethical grounding to become practice and scientific legitimacy needs a moral basis to be transformed into symbolic power After a brief discussion of French intellectual politics, I will examine the moral dimension of Bourdieu's theory-especially his concept of habitus-and of his public activism

Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (review)

Abstract: At a time when criticism indulges in reading current cultural phenomena at their most detailed and microcosmic level, Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer takes an altogether different route to the problematic relationship between politics and thought. Agamben’s is a book whose scope and implications are deliberately overarching, as is the core of its subject matter, namely, the relation of human life to political power. The novelty of his approach lies in his conviction that there are still phenomena in our present that have been untouched by the many epistemological shifts recently declared, and that demand a serious examination of the past in which they remain deeply rooted. Consequently, in investigating the current relation between human life and state power, Homo Sacer finds many of its answers in remotest antiquity, in the political writings of Aristotle and the legal theory of ancient Rome. In Aristotle, Agamben finds the first separation between the simple, animal life (zoé) we are born into and the “good” life of political participation (bios) that we enter into—a conceptual separation which, at times pronounced and at other times blurred, still haunts our politics. To pass from mere life to political life means that mere life is the necessary prerequisite of our entrance into politics. However, mere life is recognized as that prerequisite only by being excluded from the elevated sphere of politics. The central example of this paradoxical structure appears in Roman law, which provides the book with its title figure of homo sacer. It is through this metaphorical figure of the “sacred man” that Agamben grounds the workings of biopolitics—a term he borrows from Foucault but pushes, as I will discuss, toward a different direction. Significantly, the sacred man proves to be a juridical category, not a religious one, as may be first supposed. The term designates a criminal whom the state deems worthy of death, but whom it bans from being either legally executed or religiously sacrificed. Instead, the sacred man may be killed by anyone with impunity, a status that casts him, like Cain, simultaneously both in and out of human and divine law. Since his biological life is at stake,

Francis Ponge: De la connaissance en poesie (review)

Abstract: SubStance # 91, 2000 are defined, is one that has been hopelessly blurred by the constant, if often unequal, interaction between the two. Even as the post-colonial subject (and we are all post-colonial subjects) awakens to the desire to assert the uniqueness of its identity and to better understand its various others, it discovers that its own voice has already been, as Bongie might have put it, inf(l)ected by those others, and that their voices too have been altered by this contact. This is not something that needs to be proved, it is an axiomatic assertion of post-colonial studies. What makes Bongie’s book so valuable is to be found in the detailed, nuanced, and wide-ranging analyses that remind us that this process of mutual infection had begun (and begun to be understood) long before post-colonial or post-modern thinkers had come along to put a name to it. Eric Prieto University of California, Santa Barbara

Everyman an Ubermensch: The Culture of Cultural Studies

Abstract: The rise of cultural studies within the United States, predominantly in English departments, has been greeted with no small measure of disquiet within French departments, and not only on the part of traditionalists unwilling to move with the times. Though a certain pressure to stay up to date is without a doubt making itself felt, it is still unclear what this movement means for the future of French studies. Indeed, even as the announcements of jobs within French departments for specialists in cultural studies proliferate on the MLA job list, the question of exactly what such specialists in fact do within the context of French studies is as yet undefined (Petrey 382). While this question continues to work itself out within hiring committees and editorial boards, it nevertheless behooves us to ask the question: "What is cultural studies?" Its practitioners in other disciplines have long been loath to offer much in the way of a definition, for reasons which, they tell us, have everything to do with the intellectual originality of the burgeoning field. As the editors of the influential collection cum stocktaking Cultural Studies take great pains to point out, cultural studies "is not merely interdisciplinary" but "is often ... actively and aggressively anti-disciplinary." It is also anti-methodologicalits "method" being a kind of bricolage-and this is so by design (Nelson, Treichler, and Grossberg 1-2). To ask what cultural studies is, they imply, is to misunderstand this fundamental anti-or post-disciplinarity. Nevertheless, some work fits easily under the rubric of cultural studies and some work does not. A critical leftist rhetoric of "progressivism," "activism," and "intervention"-"'cultural reading' as an act of resistance" (Wallace 656), for example-is clearly a necessary and perhaps even a sufficient condition for having one's work accepted as work in cultural studies. Moreover, the cultural studiers themselves, for want of a better term, do have a relatively clear idea of what does and does not count as work in cultural studies, despite

Neurological Preference: LeVay's Study of Sexual Orientation

Abstract: The discovery that a nucleus (an aggregation of nerve cells in the brain) differs in size between heterosexual and homosexual men illustrates that sexual orientation in humans is amenable to study at the biological level, and this discovery opens the door to studies of neurotransmitters or receptors that might be involved in regulating this aspect of personality. Further interpretation of the results of this study must be considered speculative. (LeVay, 1991, 1036) Simon LeVay's caveat that interpretation of his data should be delimited has been widely disregarded. In the wake of his 1991 report in Science there has been little in the way of new data on the neurotransmitters and receptors that may be involved in regulating sexuality, and to date there has been no published replication of LeVay's key findings. There has, however, been much in the way of further interpretation of his report by academic, scientific, political, legal and media commentators. 1 For a study that is reliant on simple symmetrical axes of analysis (hetero vs. homo; male-typical vs. female-typical), LeVay's article has incited a curiously variant set of responses: gay activists who welcome the political implications of a biologically conferred homosexuality (Stein, 1993), feminist scientists who doubt the robustness of LeVay's data (Fausto-Sterling, 1992), humanities-trained critics who broach the anti-homophobic possibilities of biological research into sexuality while maintaining reservations about the particularities of LeVay's study (Rosario, 1997), scientists who accommodate LeVay's results within an already contentious body of research on the causes of homosexuality (Swaab, Zhou, Fodor and Hofman, 1997), cultural critics who find LeVay's conceptualization of sexuality and sexual identity too static (Garber, 1995), psychologists who argue alternatively that LeVay's work could be read as latent poststructuralist genealogy (Gordo-Lopez and Cleminson, 1999) or as a conventional reiteration of heterosexist norms (Hegarty, 1997), and legal theorists who warn against the use of biological theories of sexual orientation in pro-gay litigation (Halley, 1994).

The encyclopedia complex: Contemporary narratives of information

Abstract: Tout en appliquant la theorie scientifique de la complexite au domaine de la litterature et de l'histoire, l'A. compare le systeme postmoderne d'auto-organisation de la connaissance aux grands formalismes esthetiques du XIX e siecle : le romantisme, la nouvelle critique et le neokantisme.

Chance, Progress and Complexity in Biological Evolution

Abstract: their minds that they would have a hard time living without it. This is why the reminder of what evolution owes to chance, coming from certain contemporary biologists and paleontologists like Stephen Jay Gould, is salutory. The recent book by the latter, Full House, forces us to reexamine the applications of the notion of chance in the domain of biological evolution. This said, we must recognize that the specificity of the living creature, by incorporating in its very genome the history of the presumably victorious variations of its ancestors, draws the evolution of each separately considered branch along a precise trajectory, subject to constraints rooted in its history. If we must repudiate the idea of progress as too tainted by ideology, mustn't we conclude that these trajectories carry certain living creatures toward an accrued complexity, and across certain thresholds from which they cannot turn back, thereby creating new, emerging qualities?

Diderot's Hieroglyphs

Abstract: L'A. etablit une correlation metaphorique entre la description symbolique de la promenade de Vernet dans le « Salon de 1767 » et la notion picturale et poetique de hieroglyphe dans la « Lettre sur les sourds et les muets » chez Diderot. L'A. montre que le recit de la randonnee est une representation allegorique de la dialectique de l'esprit a l'oeuvre dans le jugement esthetique.

Bourdieu's Maieutics

Abstract: La rarete des participations de Pierre Bourdieu a des emissions televisees (presque toujours liees au soutien a une lutte sociale, comme les grandes greves de decembre 1995 en France) s'explique par l'analyse critique qu'il fait des medias. En prenant pour exemple ces interventions, et en se referant abondamment a ses ecrits sur la television, l'A. montre comment P.Bourdieu adopte une posture socratique lorsqu'il tente de preserver la possibilite d'une parole publique de l'intellectuel qui soit a la fois emise par le biais des medias et elaboree hors du champ journalistique

A Worldly Mind: Natural History and the Experience of Consciousness

Abstract: 1. Research into the physical foundations of consciousness and the theories that attempt to organize these data into a philosophically meaningful context continue to be guided by deeply-engrained Western habits of thought and terminology. The guidance I speak of, however, is bewildered: it continues to lead us to the brink of a chasm separating experience and physiology, thought and neurons, mind and brain. Like many others, the so-called “mind-body problem” is an historical, semantic, and self-insistent paradox. It happens like this: we believe ourselves to be physical beings, but we also believe that we are conscious beings whose awareness of physical beings cannot be physical. It would seem that we are both physical and non-physical: the problem is, how do the physical and non-physical relate, how does the physical lead to the non-physical, or how does the non-physical lead to the physical? Since by definition the physical and the non-physical have no means of communication or relationship, we have a problem. There are two ways of translating this problem into a “solution”:

Papon: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

Abstract: When the trial for crimes against humanity of former Vichy functionary and Gaullist minister Maurice Papon ended on 2 April 1998 in Bordeaux after nearly six months of deliberations, by all accounts most of the French breathed a sigh of relief. Scheduled to last only two to three months and, in the eyes of many, to offer an exemplary and final judgment on Vichy complicity in the Final Solution, the Papon trial quickly overflowed the historical, judicial, and temporal banks intended to channel its progress to become a seemingly endless fiasco that embittered some and perplexed others.' In many ways, the events in Bordeaux resembled a two-, or better yet, a three-ring circus. The convoluted and often confused legal proceedings in the courtroom were accompanied by a continuous media spectacle in the hall outside the cour d'assizes as well as in front of the court house itself.

The State They're in: Bourdieu, Debray, and the Revival of Engagement

Abstract: If there was one feature of the French cultural and political landscape over the past thirty or so years that had seemed until recently beyond dispute, it was the disappearance of the intellectuel engage/committed intellectual. The revolutionary hopes of 1968 were to come nowhere near realization in the political domain, something that perhaps became clear as early as the Gaullist electoral landslide in June of that year. The immense energies unleashed by the May movement were to invest themselves above all in the spheres of textuality and culture--a development favored by the movement's origins in the universities and the enthusiasm with which it was taken up by (most of) the intelligentsia. From the reconfiguring of education and broadcasting to the influence, often more widespread outside France than within, of Althusserian and Lacanian cultural theory, it was in the superstructure that radical change was most evident. Political change, meanwhile, took the more tranquil form of Mitterrand's election in 1981 and the subsequent tailoring of socialist aspirations to the demands of a market economy, whose global hegemony since the break-up of the Eastern bloc has remained largely unchallenged.

Introduction: Brain Cultures

Abstract: Why does SubStance begin the landmark calendar year 2000 with articles clustered around the theme of “Brain Cultures,” when surely the brain as such is a topic more fittingly found in science or even philosophy journals? The simplest answer is that the brain has become a privileged site for locating the nature of the human being. Indeed, in a “post-human” age, the brain may be the last outpost of, if not a human essence, a distinctly human character. If literary and critical theory in the 1970s and ‘80s questioned “the subject” as a ground for thought, then cognitive and neuroscience in the 1990s—officially hailed by George Bush senior as “the decade of the brain”—began to map the neurobiological substrates and underpinnings of thinking. And if initial forays into medical/anatomical research into brain functioning marked the last years of the nineteenth century as “the golden age of neuroscience,” then the last years of the twentieth century constituted another golden age in which, many scientists claim, we learned more about the brain than we had known up to that point. In the wake of this massive surge of research and burgeoning popular interest in the topic, it is important to sound out the implications of work on the brain, to take stock of where we stand as a species in light of it, and to chart out some of the paths down which this focal point of research will lead us. How and why did the brain become an object of such widespread fascination? In part, perhaps, because it lets us eat our scientific cake and have our humanism too—meaning that all the technical findings about the brain affirm our faith in the progressive march of science, while the limits of this research reassure us that something essentially human (consciousness, a self) remains inexplicable to this mounting wave of knowledge. Scientific introductions often present the brain as the “most complex” thing in the universe, a rhetorical turn that enables the reader to marvel at the ability of science to sound out the limits of complexity, while comfortably knowing that this oh-so-human system remains to be comprehended fully—not to mention the narcissistic pleasure of knowing that one’s head contains this unica of complexity! To put this double-think differently, the brain has

Gilles Deleuze's Time Machine (review)

Abstract: SubStance # 91, 2000 Lévy calls the quoi and the comment, or the object of knowledge and the means of knowledge: invoking an insistent looping movement, Lévy states that in Ponge’s poetry “la co-détermination entre le quoi et le comment, entre l’objet et sa méthode de mesure, est générale” (87). Once again, Lévy’s strategy imitates Ponge’s own, and with considerable elegance. He develops his analyses in this book logically and clearly, with close attention to the path that he traces for his reader. Yet his remarks are richly recursive, too, and his system continually recuperates and redeploys its results. His critical touch is a deft, incisive one, yet it has an admirable lightness about it (in Italo Calvino’s sense) which serves to preserve the integrity and the singularity of its object. He speaks in his conclusion about the ways in which Ponge’s experiment was crucially flawed, about the fundamental impossibility of his attempt to replace the real by a page of poetry, suggesting however that the long process of the experiment is in itself both moving and astonishing when closely considered. For Lévy sees something else at work here, a figure that intrigues him just as much as any of the Pongian effects, techniques, and topoi that he has discussed thus far: “En fait, derrière son parti pris des choses, se profile toujours un sujet engagé, un sujet de la connaissance, que ce soit l’auteur ou le lecteur” (134). One could suggest, too, that just this kind of subject is at work in the pages of Sydney Lévy’s Ponge, and that watching him engage writing on its own ground and in its own terms is one of the principal delights that awaits the reader of this shrewd, remarkable book Warren Motte University of Colorado

Papon: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (article)

Abstract: When the trial for crimes against humanity of former Vichy functionary and Gaullist minister Maurice Papon ended on 2 April 1998 in Bordeaux after nearly six months of deliberations, by all accounts most of the French breathed a sigh of relief. Scheduled to last only two to three months and, in the eyes of many, to offer an exemplary and final judgment on Vichy complicity in the Final Solution, the Papon trial quickly overflowed the historical, judicial, and temporal banks intended to channel its progress to become a seemingly endless fiasco that embittered some and perplexed others.1 In many ways, the events in Bordeaux resembled a two-, or better yet, a three-ring circus. The convoluted and often confused legal proceedings in the courtroom were accompanied by a continuous media spectacle in the hall outside the cour d’assizes as well as in front of the court house itself. Each time the President of the Court, Jean-Louis Castagnède, announced a recess, defense and civil parties lawyers exited the courtroom to be greeted by reporters, bright lights, and television cameras. Those interviewed commented sur le vif not only on testimony just given but editorialized about its long-term implications for the trial or the eventual fate of the accused. The stars of the show included Papon’s haughty defense counsel, Jean-Marc Varaut, a distinguished lawyer and author of books on the Nuremberg trials and the trial of Philippe Pétain, and civil parties lawyer Arno Klarsfeld, the son of “memory militants” Serge and Beate Klarsfeld. Arno’s long hair, casual attire (usually blue jeans and boots under his robes) and photogenic good looks, along with his penchant for arriving on roller blades and indulging in outrageous and occasionally abusive tactics in court, distingushed him from other counsel as well the other participants in the trial itself. While Klarsfeld fils alternately dazzled or offended those inside, on the steps of the courthouse Klarsfeld père led demonstrations and commemorations and offered outspoken opinions to the media often intended to put pressure on the proceedings themselves. For Henry Rousso,