N Pepperell Says: April 26, 2008 at 1:03 am
I’ve been thinking about this discussion for the past couple of days. The post hits some central issues for me, as I spend much of my time trying to unpack Marx’s style in order to make sense of the underlying argument (I agree with traxus that Marx is also needlessly - and deliberately - difficult: the composition of individual sentences and the flow of the text may seem clear enough, but the argumentative structure and textual strategy of a work like Capital is deeply obscurantist). Marx would have defended his presentational style on substantive grounds: he thought this form of presentation was necessary to express what he wanted to express. The consequence, though, was a fairly predictable and understandable set of interpretations of Capital that sit in deep tension with what I take to be Marx’s actual argument. The amount of time it has taken for me to try to make sense of the text - and then the additional time it takes to show other readers why Marx chooses to express this content in that form… it’s deeply frustrating, particularly given that the underlying argument is already complex enough to state in its own right, without having also to take the reader on long tours through the idiosyncracies of Marx’s textual strategy…
The points on transference above echo some things I have thought in relation to parts of Adorno’s work, where he adopts a particular style in order precisely to attempt to undermine a certain relationship of the reader to an authoritative author, by involving the reader in the constitution of the textual constellation: I understand what Adorno is seeking to achieve, and I enjoy his work - but my underlying reaction is that texts are read in very different conditions over time, by readers socialised in different ways - and that the impact of a style, or the attempt to cultivate a particular experience of reading in order to transform the reader, in some sense perhaps relies on the notion that style would always have the same impact over time, as everything else changes around it. There seems to me to be a sort of assumption lurking that the text can control the conditions of its reading - coupled with a notion that particular habits of perception and thought have intrinsic political implications, as though political implications would not be negotiated dynamically with a complex surrounding environment.
Of course texts can be intended as interventions into some very specific situation. But they persist. They fall into different constellations. They become, as a result, different texts. This both leads me to be sympathetic to the sorts of points made in the original post - to be a bit suspicious about whether the advantages that are meant to derive from certain stylistic presentations, really do eventuate. But also to apply this same suspicion reflexively: I sense a value, now, to texts that seek a particular sort of accessible presentation - but I am also intervening into a particular moment - a moment that will eventually transform around the texts I generate myself. This suspicion doesn’t make me less committed to how I want to write; it just reminds me of how reliant is any sort of stylistic commitment, on factors beyond the writer’s control.
All of this says nothing about Sinthome’s other points: that some of what is being discussed is simply “bad writing”, and that certain sorts of communities and attachments seem to coalesce around the reading practices demanded by particular texts. Just associating to some of the side thoughts the post provoked for me…
Alexei Says: April 26, 2008 at 8:49 am
I’m inclined to agree with N, and I’m not sure there’s really anything more to add, save that bad writing isn’t necessarily obscurantist, or ‘difficult’(in the sense of ‘intellectually arduous’). It’s just a nuisance, which has prompted folks to sometimes offer rather Ptolemic interpretations of a thinker in order to make bad writing into a smart insight into the nature of X.
So,with this said, let me just respond to the questions directed to me:
(1) Floyd, the book I mentioned is entitled The Trouble with Physics by Lee Smolin. It’s a pop-science book that argues something to the effect that String Theory is the biggest detour Physics has ever taken in that if one wants to do physics, or obtain a research grant, one must do string theory even though it has no experimental or predictive facet.
(2) Sinthome, although I don’t know Lacan’s 20th Seminar (I’ve only ever flipped through his Ecrits and, to say something entirely about me, I found it to be rather unhelpful, and largely uninteresting), and it feels like decades have passed since someone has even mentioned Deleuze to me. But this said, and restricting myself to Deleuze’s work, I’m really hard put to say that there is any difference, which makes a difference, between him, Kant, and Badiou at the level of difficulty, ‘good/bad’ writing style, or accessibility.
If there is a difference among them, it’s this: Kant has been around long enough for some of the dust to settle around his work, and for us to see what he was up to. IN his own time, however, Kant was considered to be obscure and difficult (indeed, his prose is still nothing less than Teutonic — impossibly long, convoluted sentences, verging on ungrammaticality — and arguments with missing or implied premises that are only made thematic well after the arguments for which they are needed have been concluded, interlocutors who are mentioned only once (if at all) in his entire work, etc). Some have even argued (eg Blumenberg) that Kant’s work only found an appropriate audience in the 20th Century.
In any event, this picture of Kant does seem similar to the one you have painted of Deleuze. Impossible sentences, missing interlocutors and influences, etc. So I’m completely unconvinced that there’s any substantive difference between the two. We just need more time with Deleuze.
Same with Marx and Badiou: although Marx was a fine writer (and Badiou isn’t), both have moved philosophical problems from a ‘philosophical ground’ onto a ’scientific one:’ Marx moves from ideational philosophy, to an immanent, reflexive description of social and economic phenomena, which are taken (and then shown) to be constitutive of our self-concpetion and social interaction. Badiou moves from a straightforward, transcendental understanding of what Hegel would call ‘Spirit,’ to the hypertrophied formalism of set-theory. The difficulty in reading these thinkers stems from the fact that (a) one needs to readjust one’s naturalized perspective and leave behind some baggage in order to follow them, and (b) one has to be able to follow the ’sciency’ bits. If one can’t accommodate a and b, then their texts are difficult and obscure.
Now, since I don’t want to be completely tangential to this conversation, I take it that the difficulties, charitably read so as to excuse bad grammar etc, is necessary insofar as we can speak of something like progress. Like the distinction you are trying to express, Sinthome, there are times when the available technical resource are insufficient to their task. Hence difficulty.
But then it’s our task to continue to refine the ‘new tools’ in order to get a hold on what our predecessors were trying to fashion. But this implies that Deleuze, for instance, or Badiou don’t get it ‘right,’ don’t express what they needed to, and hence their ‘tools’ need to be refashioned. Hence the need for difficult texts.
larvalsubjects Says: April 26, 2008 at 3:45 pm
Alexei, I think your remarks significantly ignore the role that textual strategy plays in thinkers like Hegel, Adorno, Lacan, Derrida, and Deleuze. In these cases there was a very explicit meditation on the relationship between the form of presentation and the content presented, and a conscious effort to cultivate a particular style of presentation in keeping with the content of presentation. Kant is difficult because the content of what he is attempting to express, but I can’t say that I’ve found a similar meditation or self-conscious cultivation of style in Kant. In the case of Lacan, Derrida, Deleuze, and Adorno, there is the self-conscious aim of developing a style that would itself be differential in character, or that would escape the primacy of identity in metaphysics through its very form of expression. This is going to have consequences where textual constructions is concerned. In short, I don’t think the “difficulty” of these works is simply a function of the ideas being “new” and therefore unfamiliar. Rather, there is something closer to the transcendental going on here. Insofar as thought necessarily tends towards the representational and identity– towards “abstraction” or “thing-thinking” in Hegel-speak –such texts will be inherently difficult due to their differential and dialectical nature, regardless of the historical setting in which they’re read (barring, of course, a massive transformation in the nature of cognition and a fundamental shift away from intentionality directed towards identical objects). Jameson does a fairly good job discussing this in Late Marxism: Adorno or the Persistence of the Dialectic. I personally don’t find the same struggle in reading Badiou, who strikes me as giving a rather straightforward presentation of his claims (he’s very programmatic). Badiou explicitly speaks to developing a style that is maximally transmissible as one of his goals. While his claims may be difficult to understand as accounts of the world– if we bend to Floyd’s primacy of “lived experience” (a prison house if ever there were), then we’ll find it very difficult to think being as pure multiplicities of multiplicities without unification or one –but stylistically his specific claims aren’t difficult to pin down. This is very different than the case of a Deleuze or Lacan where it’s not at all clear what is even being claimed. I can say with confidence what Badiou is claiming or arguing even if I have difficulty understanding what it would be like to live in such a world, I cannot say with confidence what Lacan is explicitly claiming.
N.Pepperell, I think this is an interesting observation:
The points on transference above echo some things I have thought in relation to parts of Adorno’s work, where he adopts a particular style in order precisely to attempt to undermine a certain relationship of the reader to an authoritative author, by involving the reader in the constitution of the textual constellation: I understand what Adorno is seeking to achieve, and I enjoy his work - but my underlying reaction is that texts are read in very different conditions over time, by readers socialised in different ways - and that the impact of a style, or the attempt to cultivate a particular experience of reading in order to transform the reader, in some sense perhaps relies on the notion that style would always have the same impact over time, as everything else changes around it. There seems to me to be a sort of assumption lurking that the text can control the conditions of its reading - coupled with a notion that particular habits of perception and thought have intrinsic political implications, as though political implications would not be negotiated dynamically with a complex surrounding environment.
I agree that texts are ecological in the sense that they resonate differently depending on the surroundings in which they’re read (much like one and the same sound can produce very different affects depending on what other notes it’s related to). I wonder, however, whether it’s entirely fair to these thinkers to suggest that they’re trying to control the experience of the reader. In the case of Deleuze, for example, it seems that his works (especially the later ones with Guattari) are designed to do something rather than represent something. That is, they’re designed to function as catalysts of sorts. This would be in close keeping with your ecological discussion of texts resonating differently. A text like A Thousand Plateaus is designed to actualize itself in a variety of ways through different encounters and embeddings. It doesn’t mean or represent something, but instead interacts with the world about it and its readers producing something else. This would be very different than a root-text where authorial intention governs the meaning and sense of the text.
On the other hand, it seems to me that every text has its apparatus of capture, where it simultaneously invites a certain sort of reader and seeks to construct a certain sort of reader. I suppose that if this is the case the question becomes one of investigating the different modes of capture and construction.
Identifying with your captor « An und für sich Says: April 26, 2008 at 5:00 pm
[...] April 26, 2008 I have some reservations about the recent Larval Subjects post about “difficult” books, but I think that, in part, it points toward a real phenomenon — one that I call [...]
parodycenter Says: April 26, 2008 at 5:01 pm
A text like A Thousand Plateaus is designed to actualize itself in a variety of ways through different encounters and embeddings. It doesn’t mean or represent something, but instead interacts with the world about it and its readers producing something else.
Dr Sinthome I think you´re completely right. I recently started the Anti-Oedipus. I had long been put off by the book because of my impression that, following Lacan´s frequent complaint, it wasn´t aware of the way it gets bogged down in metaphors of its own making, to what extent its language was metaphorized I mean, and in this way the book´s attempt to reinterpret Oedipus seemed like a truism to me (you can´t reinterpret metaphors by inventing more metaphors). But then one day while reading the chapter on the Body Without Organs I realized that the book itself is a Body without Organs, generating numerous realities/multiplicities and that that´s the most astonishing thing about it. It seemed like a prequel of blogs and all these other hypertextual creations of the 21st century. The book seemed to me like a portal to parallel realities. That said I find the style often dry, and difficult to follow due to its insistence on a kind of a mathematical tone, for which I don´t quite have the right impression. It really takes an obsessive scholar such as yourself to have the patience and the anal rigor to make sense out of this and translate it to some kind of an understandable Texan drawl. This is why I have faith in your book´s success, even as ´´Difference and Givenness´´, in marketing terms, is a recipe for commercial failure!
parodycenter Says: April 26, 2008 at 5:34 pm
I mean can you imagine Madonna or Britney Spears singing something like ´´difference and givenness´´, and you´ll get my advertising point.
parodycenter Says: April 26, 2008 at 5:41 pm
But on the other hand if you´re pessimistically inclined, you could think that Deleuze and Guattari, whose gayness is inescapable in their sympathies for the female side of the sexuation graph, created just another language grid and in this way have been trapped by language even as they were trying to ´´burn a hole through the silk´´ as in Lynch´s Deleuzian masterpiece INLAND EMPIRE, to expose the Hole, the Light shining through all the blankness, and find creativity in it. I wonder also if this isn´t the same thing that Guy Hocqunghem tried to reach through his asshole only to realize that the obsessive compulsive neurosis didn´t disappear and that the Phallic law wasn´t broken. 6:36 PM 6:59 PM
