THE TEXT: MEANINGS, IMPLICATIONS, AND DISTORTIONS
Mukesh Williams
Anything we confess or profess implies taking a position. A position would imply apart from other things an act of laying down of a proposition or a thesis. Even opening up a debate, seeking genealogies or simply deconstructing are all acts that take up a position even when they deny doing so. Nothing is neutral. Every act intervenes. The signature in a text points at an intention, to some hidden agenda. Hegel had once pointed out that inversions and displacements are created through what is said and what is meant. Though academic deconstruction has claimed to be apolitical Derrida has always insisted of the political nature of the exercise. Perhaps Edward Said was right when he suggested that American deconstruction was overtly neoconservative. The message of a text may be misconstrued or used for ideological advantage and may have nothing to do with the original meaning or implication of the text. But then is the author responsible for the distortion of the text? Derrida points out that the “effects or structure of a text are not reducible to its ‘truth,’ to the intended meaning of its presumed author, or even its supposedly unique and identifiable signatory” (Derrida, The Ear of the Other, 1985 29). Does it mean that the author relinquishes all responsibility of the ideas he proffers?
Showing posts with label Derrida. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Derrida. Show all posts
Thursday, July 8, 2010
ETHICAL ASSUMPTIONS AND THE PARADOX OF GIFT, HOSPITALITY, FORGIVENESS AND MOURNING
by
© Mukesh Williams
My point is not that everything is bad, but that everything is dangerous, which is not exactly the same as bad. If everything is dangerous, then we always have something to do.
Foucault, “On the Genealogy of Ethics,” The Foucault Reader, 343
The self is through and through a hostage, older than the ego, prior to principles. What is at stake for the self, in its being, is not to be. Beyond egoism and altruism it is the religiosity of the self.
Levinas, Otherwise Than Being Or Beyond Essence, 117
The methods to draw ethical assumptions and the way to investigate them have always dominated western philosophical inquiry right from Plato to the present. The seriousness of this pursuit in moral philosophy can be measured by the fact that seminal European philosophers such as Kant and Hegel were deeply involved in the ethical project. The western ethical inquiry was also deeply connected to the investigations about spirituality, consciousness, the construction of being and the act of knowing. Levinas states, “For the philosophical tradition of the West, all spirituality lies in consciousness, thematic expression of being, knowing” (Otherwise Than Being Or Beyond Essence, 99).
In recent times both ethics and ethical behavior are seen more as puzzles that may not be fully realized but unsurely grasped in their assumed contradiction. Foucault was suspicious of the ethical alternative offered by the Greeks. He was skeptical of their ethical assumptions and worked on the genealogy of ethics rather than on seeking a solution or an alternative. He cautioned us of its dangers and warned us to be always busy to do “something” (Foucault, “On The Genealogy of Ethics” 343). By ‘something’ he meant the interrogation of ethical issues that instead of liberating us often imprison us. Derrida goes beyond the totalizing narratives of ethics and reveals the aporia or paradox that lies buried deep in social practices connected to gift giving, hospitality, forgiveness and mourning.
APPROACHES TO ETHICS
There are three fundamental approaches to the understanding of ethics—theoretical, utilitarian and practical which includes Kant, Rorty and John Rawls. Winston Churchill’s famous statement in a 1941speech to the British Parliament during a debate on how to rebuild the House of Commons destroyed in the aerial bombing by the Luftwaffe: “We shape our buildings, and afterwards our buildings shape us.” This must be read with Heidegger’s concept that technology surrounds us. Architecture possesses a presence, a mood and a texture that subtly and patiently shapes our sensibility and guides us into observations of ourselves and the world we live in. A virtual architecture gives rise to a reflexive architecture or a virtual environment imagined and fantasized by a linguistic architecture.
HUME, MILL AND UTILITARIANISM
Early philosophers attempted to define human nature and built their ethical standards in terms of either self-love or benevolence. David Hume saw benevolence as an essential human component of nature, something that ultimately gave rise to morality. Hume argued against Hobbes’s theory that private interest was the prime motive in human action. Hume suggested that it was not ego but benevolence that was the fundamental aspect of human nature. He felt that ego was connected to fear and ambition while benevolence to more altruistic emotions. Benevolence implied virtues based on goodwill, generosity and love. These emotions became a part of virtues operated in friendship, charity and compassion. Hume did not reject the ego but saw it as a mixture of the dove-wolf-serpent metaphor. He saw both benevolence and justice as social virtues but felt that benevolence was primary human nature while justice was a normative human convention.
The proponents of utilitarianism especially John Stuart Mill argued that the ‘greatest happiness’ principle or utility defined moral standards and laid the foundations of all ethical behavior. An action was right if it promoted human happiness, and wrong if it did not. Duty, obligation and right were all subordinate to this utility principle. The utilitarian philosophy argued that utility was the supreme ethical standard.
KANT, RORTY AND RAWLS
Though Kant rejects the centrality of the utilitarian principle he located it in duty and beneficence. The virtue of benevolent actions must spring from duty and not from friendly inclination. It is only duty which is performed without personal gain. Benevolence based on friendly inclination has no limits but duty does as it is both clear and precise. However Kant does not define the limits of beneficence or duty. Bernard Gert believes that the concept of beneficence has no moral rules but only moral ideals that prevent people from causing harm. Gert believes that the goal of morality is to lessen evil but not to promote good. Rationality may help to lessen evil but cannot promote eternal good.
Rorty takes his cue from the utilitarian Jeremy Bentham by presuming that all discussions on morality are firmly rooted in the individual ego. Values are therefore personal possessions. Marxism sees human nature as a “totality of social relations” and not as “idiosyncratic fantasy” (Marx 1963; Rorty, 1989 42). Rorty camouflages ideas in vague language such as the following when he explains the purpose of social organization: “the point of social organization is to let everybody have a chance at self-creation to the best of his or her abilities, and that the goal requires besides peace and wealth, the standard ‘bourgeois freedoms’” (Rorty, 1989 84). There is too much personal choice in the phrase “to the best of his or her abilities.” The statement does not acknowledge the constraints placed by society on individual effort. Charles Taylor believes that most of Enlightenment utilitarianism takes up an unacknowledged moral position because it is primarily interested to debunk moral statements which it sees as arising from religious authority (Rorty, Sources of the Self 339-40).
Rawls’ principles of justice enunciated in A Theory of Justice are libertarian and egalitarian. His principles include equal liberty and greatest social and economic benefits to the least advantaged. He introduces the concept of ‘difference principle’ which advocates giving more power to the underprivileged in terms of income and status. He discusses the socialist idea of distributive justice where responsibilities in society are distributed according to ability and benefits. Martha C. Nussbaum develops Rawls theory further by incorporating Amatya Sen’s idea of substantial freedom and argues that opportunities have to be real supported by governmentality which direct political institutions to allow everyone to participate in political discussion and shape their own lives (Nussbaum, Women and Human Development). She adds that both citizens and governments must be made to commit to create a threshold of real opportunities.
DERRIDA’S PUZZLES
Towards the end of his life Derrida was relatively preoccupied with philosophical impasses, social paradoxes and irresolvable puzzles, what today we term as “possible aporias-impossible aporias.” Aporias or puzzles have affected our important social rituals such as hospitality, forgiving and mourning where the conditions that make them possible are the very conditions that negate their possibility. Derrida interrogates these rituals to see if they possess ideal authenticity.
Derrida not only problematizes the simple social and personal acts of giving gifts, forgiveness mourning and hospitality. He reveals that these acts are never completely genuine. It is only in their denial that they achieve authenticity. There is an aporia, a paradox, in them that deny their authenticity. Perhaps Derrida’s interrogation is born out of his own sense of discrimination and loss. He questions the totalizing vocabularies of the Enlightenment and the moral and humanistic tradition of our times. His attempt is not to debunk these important practices but to open them up to see their paradoxical positions. Such knowledge would allow us to act responsibly.
Responsibility is the key component in his interrogation. It is rather naive to assume that debunking is the only post-modern condition of philosophy. Derrida wants to show that our certitudes are not stable, that there are paradoxes embedded in our beliefs and assumptions. Aporias therefore leave us with a discourse that is at once informative and puzzling.
THE GIFT
In Given Time Derrida argues that a authentic gift must escape the oppositional logic of giving and receiving and must transcend self interest or rational calculation. A gift cannot just appear by itself as it will soon be cancelled out by a recompense or equivalence. Even the mere knowledge of a gift will destroy it being termed as a gift. A simple ‘thank you’ cancels a gift by acknowledging its presence and suggesting equivalence. ‘Thank you’ suggests the erasure of indebtedness to the giver and the conclusion of the act. Else a cycle of receiving and giving begins to operate following the logic of one good deed deserves another. A gift often functions as a command to respond; the receiver is expected to acknowledge the giver. A gift can be manipulated for personal advantage and then cancels its original purpose altogether. It may be rather difficult to give without gaining some psychological satisfaction but Derrida is not analyzing the psychological issues connected with the ego. He is merely questioning the process of giving and receiving an authentic gift.
An authentic gift must be anonymous without the slightest hint of getting something in return. The person who gives should not realize that he has given a gift—let not your left hand know what your right hand has given. He should not be in a position to congratulate himself of his goodness. A genuine gift involves the separation of the self from the other and that makes the giving of an authentic gift almost impossible. For Derrida the existential problem of gift giving is this: it is impossible to realize unconditional philanthropy. The incommensurable nature of authentic giving and receiving escapes the dialectic of amalgamation. In brief, though we look for genuine giving, the act always eludes us.
HOSPITALITY
It is impossible to practice authentic hospitality before strangers. Absolute hospitality involves the giving of everything we possess to others and the difficulty of doing so. Within this tension the concept of hospitality is afloat. In order to give you must possess something to give—house, country, nation—and that involves control or mastery. Hospitality is a function of power which requires ownership of property, some sort of dominant identity, some sort of power over the hosted. If the hosted uses force to occupy the host’s house then the ritual of hospitality ends and the logic of forced occupancy punishable by law comes into existence. In wider terms this involves closing of borders and excluding certain ethnic groups. Hospitality selects some to be included in the hospitality ritual but simultaneously excludes others classifying them as ‘aliens’ or ‘refuges.’ The placing of limit or invoking trespass makes hospitality inhospitable. Hospitality without conditions implies welcoming everyone and relinquishing property claims. This seems as impossible hospitality. But if you allow this condition to occur then the notion of hospitality gets erased as the host does not exist.
FORGIVENESS
It is impossible to really forgive the unforgivable—a mortal sin for example (Derrida, On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness 32). If we can forgive something then it is actually forgivable. This forgiving is based on our reason. In effect we do not genuinely forgive. Forgiving involves a kind of madness, an unconscious act that functions outside the framework of political or legal rationality. Forgiveness may involve an unconditional clemency without seeking apology from the guilty person, though a tension between conditional forgiveness and apology may exist. This process is evident in amnesty and reconciliation and does not therefore constitute genuine forgiveness. Derrida reveals an inherent paradox, an eternal rupture, in the entire process of forgiveness that cannot be resolved as it depends upon the separation of self from the other. Derrida argues that, “genuine forgiveness must engage two singularities: the guilty and the victim. As soon as a third party intervenes, one can again speak of amnesty, reconciliation, reparation, etc., but certainly not of forgiveness in the strict sense” (Derrida, On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness 42).
Derrida points out that it is not possible to imagine a face-to-face encounter without the mediation of a third party—even when the third party is language itself—then the empirical paradox acquires the condition of aporia. Absolute forgiveness requires a direct involvement of the self with the other, while mediation breaches this category. If we know of the motive of the other person through language or a third party than genuine forgiveness is not possible. Though this impasse may not be overcome evaluating both sides is the only responsible action.
MOURNING
Derrida’s interrogation of mourning is born out of the pain of losing a friend in Paul de Man and the latter’s Nazi affiliation. A successful mourning is never possible as the other is interiorized and becomes a part of us. Since the other loses his indisputable alterity a complete mourning does not take place. The refusal to mourn successfully prolongs the alterity of the other—“an aborted interiorisation is at the same time a respect for the other as other” (Derrida, Mourning DeMann 6). In a sense a successful morning is the condition when we are unable to mourn—“success fails, failure succeeds.”
In “Fors” Derrida expands upon his concept of mourning with some help from post-Freudian theories. He distinguishes between introjections which implies the “love for the other in me” and incorporation which means retaining the other as within one’s own body. Derrida agrees with Freud, Abraham and Toruk successful morning involves introjections of the other but he does not valorize this process—the more the self “keeps the foreign element inside itself the more it excludes it” (Derrida, Fors xvii). Incorporation invariably turns pathological but retains the alterity of the other. Derrida’s loss is the loss of exchange and the opportunity of transformation de Mann presented. In the process of mourning the “otherness of the other” opposes both introjection and incorporation. We must therefore emphasize both respect for and resistance to the other (Derrida, Mémoires: for Paul de Man 160, 238).
We reject the ethical paradigm and reorganize another structure not against incommensurable but the deficiency of its internal logic. In Structures of Scientific Revolutions published in 1962 Thomas Kuhn suggests that a paradigm is rejected not from the outside but for reasons that arise from within it. Kant warned us in his The Critique of Pure Reason that everything would come under the ambit of criticism and reason: “Our age is, in especial degree, the age of criticism, and to criticism everything must submit.” What is important for the interrogation of both ethics and the self is to go beyond egoism, altruism and the “religiosity of the self” (Levinas, Otherwise Than Being Or Beyond Essence 117). We can take a leaf from Levinas when he says that the self can be free in its being when it decides “not to be.”
Works Cited
ATTRIDGE, ed. Acts of Literature. New York: Routledge, 1992.
BRAULT AND NAAS TRANS. Adieu to Emmanuel Lévinas. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1999.
CORNELL, CARLSON AND BENJAMIN EDS. Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice, (inc. “Force of the Law”). New York: Routledge, 1992.
DERRIDA, JACQUES AND DOFOURMANTELLE, A. Of Hospitality, trans. Bowlby, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000.
________. Circumfessions: Fifty Nine Periphrases, in Bennington, G., Jacques Derrida, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993.
________. Dissemination. trans. Johnson, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981.
________. Politics of Friendship, trans. Collins, New York: Verso, 1997.
________. Positions, trans. Bass, London: Athlone Press, 1981.
________. Spectres of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International, trans. Kamuf, New York: Routledge, 1994.
________. The Ear of the Other: Otobiography, Transference, Translation, trans. Kamuf, ed. McDonald, New York: Schocken Books, 1985.
________. The Gift of Death, trans. Wills, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995.
________. The Work of Mourning, eds. Brault & Naas, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001.
________. Writing and Difference, trans. Bass, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978.
________. ‘Speech and Phenomena’ and Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs, trans. Allison, Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973.
________. “Fors: The Anglish Words of Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok”, trans. Johnson, in The Wolfman’s Magic Word: A Cryptonomy, Abraham, N., & Torok, M., trans. Rand, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986.
________. “Hostipitality” in Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities, Vol. 5, Number 3, Dec 2000.
________. “Le Toucher: Touch/to touch him”, in Paragraph, trans. Kamuf, 16:2, 1993, p 122-57.
________. “Nietzsche and the Machine: Interview with Jacques Derrida” (interviewer Beardsworth) in Journal of Nietzsche Studies, Issue 7, Spring 1994 (NM). Of Grammatology, trans. Spivak, Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1976.
________. “Ousia and Gramme: A Note to a Footnote in Being and Time” trans. Casey in Phenomenology in Perspective, ed. Smith, The Hague: Nijhoff, 1970.
________. “Psyche: Inventions of the Other” in Reading De Man Reading, eds. Waters & Godzich, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989.
________. “‘Eating Well’ or the Calculation of the Subject: An Interview with Jacques Derrida” in Who Comes After the Subject? eds. Cadava, Connor, & Nancy, New York: Routledge, 1991, p 96-119.
________. Edmund Husserl’s ‘Origin of Geometry’: An Introduction. trans. Leavey, Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1978 (1962).
________. Given Time: i. Counterfeit Money, trans. Kamuf, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992.
________. Le Toucher: Jean-Luc Nancy, Paris: Galilée, 2000.
________. Limited Inc. (inc. “Afterword”), ed. Graff, trans. Weber, Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1998.
________. Margins of Philosophy, trans. Bass, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982.
________. Mémoires: for Paul de Man. trans. Lindsay, Culler, Cadava, & Kamuf, New York: Columbia University Press, 1989.
________. Memoirs of the Blind: The Self-Portrait and Other Ruins, trans. Brault & Naas, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993.
________. Monolingualism of the Other or the Prosthesis of Origin, trans. Mensh, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996.
________. On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness. London: Routledge, 2001.
________. On the Name (inc. “Passions”). ed. Dutoit, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995.
________. Parages, Paris: Galilée, 1986. Points… Interviews, 1974-1995, ed. Weber, trans. Kamuf et al, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995.
FOUCAULT, MICHEL “On the Genealogy of Ethics: An Overview of Work in Progress,” in Rainbow, ed. The Foucault Reader. New York: Pantheon, 1984.
GERT, BERNARD. Morality. New York : Oxford University Press, 2005.
LEVINAS, EMMANUEL. Otherwise Than Being Or Beyond Essence. Alphonso Lingis trans. Pittsburg: Duquesne University Press, 1999.
MARX, KARL. Karl Marx: Selected Writings in Sociology and Social Philosophy. trans T. B. Bottomore, ed. T. B. Bottomore and M. Rubel. London: Penguin Books, 1963.
NUSSBAUM, MARTHA C. Women and Human Development. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.
RAWLS, JOHN. A Theory of Justice. Harvard University Press, 1971.
RORTY, RICHARD. Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989.
TAYLOR, CHARLES. "The Dialogical Self" in The Interpretive Turn edited by David R. Hiley and others. New York: Cornell University Press, 1991: 304-14.
________. "Rorty in the Epistemological Tradition" in Reading Rorty, edited by Alan Malachowski. Cambridge: Basil Blackwell, 1990: 339-64.
________. Consequences of Pragmatism. Minneapolis: University of Minessota Press, 1982.
________. Essays on Heidegger and Others: Philosophical Papers v 2. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.
________. Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989.
________. The Ethics of Authenticity. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991.
________.Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth: Philosophical Papers, v. 1. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.
© Mukesh Williams
My point is not that everything is bad, but that everything is dangerous, which is not exactly the same as bad. If everything is dangerous, then we always have something to do.
Foucault, “On the Genealogy of Ethics,” The Foucault Reader, 343
The self is through and through a hostage, older than the ego, prior to principles. What is at stake for the self, in its being, is not to be. Beyond egoism and altruism it is the religiosity of the self.
Levinas, Otherwise Than Being Or Beyond Essence, 117
The methods to draw ethical assumptions and the way to investigate them have always dominated western philosophical inquiry right from Plato to the present. The seriousness of this pursuit in moral philosophy can be measured by the fact that seminal European philosophers such as Kant and Hegel were deeply involved in the ethical project. The western ethical inquiry was also deeply connected to the investigations about spirituality, consciousness, the construction of being and the act of knowing. Levinas states, “For the philosophical tradition of the West, all spirituality lies in consciousness, thematic expression of being, knowing” (Otherwise Than Being Or Beyond Essence, 99).
In recent times both ethics and ethical behavior are seen more as puzzles that may not be fully realized but unsurely grasped in their assumed contradiction. Foucault was suspicious of the ethical alternative offered by the Greeks. He was skeptical of their ethical assumptions and worked on the genealogy of ethics rather than on seeking a solution or an alternative. He cautioned us of its dangers and warned us to be always busy to do “something” (Foucault, “On The Genealogy of Ethics” 343). By ‘something’ he meant the interrogation of ethical issues that instead of liberating us often imprison us. Derrida goes beyond the totalizing narratives of ethics and reveals the aporia or paradox that lies buried deep in social practices connected to gift giving, hospitality, forgiveness and mourning.
APPROACHES TO ETHICS
There are three fundamental approaches to the understanding of ethics—theoretical, utilitarian and practical which includes Kant, Rorty and John Rawls. Winston Churchill’s famous statement in a 1941speech to the British Parliament during a debate on how to rebuild the House of Commons destroyed in the aerial bombing by the Luftwaffe: “We shape our buildings, and afterwards our buildings shape us.” This must be read with Heidegger’s concept that technology surrounds us. Architecture possesses a presence, a mood and a texture that subtly and patiently shapes our sensibility and guides us into observations of ourselves and the world we live in. A virtual architecture gives rise to a reflexive architecture or a virtual environment imagined and fantasized by a linguistic architecture.
HUME, MILL AND UTILITARIANISM
Early philosophers attempted to define human nature and built their ethical standards in terms of either self-love or benevolence. David Hume saw benevolence as an essential human component of nature, something that ultimately gave rise to morality. Hume argued against Hobbes’s theory that private interest was the prime motive in human action. Hume suggested that it was not ego but benevolence that was the fundamental aspect of human nature. He felt that ego was connected to fear and ambition while benevolence to more altruistic emotions. Benevolence implied virtues based on goodwill, generosity and love. These emotions became a part of virtues operated in friendship, charity and compassion. Hume did not reject the ego but saw it as a mixture of the dove-wolf-serpent metaphor. He saw both benevolence and justice as social virtues but felt that benevolence was primary human nature while justice was a normative human convention.
The proponents of utilitarianism especially John Stuart Mill argued that the ‘greatest happiness’ principle or utility defined moral standards and laid the foundations of all ethical behavior. An action was right if it promoted human happiness, and wrong if it did not. Duty, obligation and right were all subordinate to this utility principle. The utilitarian philosophy argued that utility was the supreme ethical standard.
KANT, RORTY AND RAWLS
Though Kant rejects the centrality of the utilitarian principle he located it in duty and beneficence. The virtue of benevolent actions must spring from duty and not from friendly inclination. It is only duty which is performed without personal gain. Benevolence based on friendly inclination has no limits but duty does as it is both clear and precise. However Kant does not define the limits of beneficence or duty. Bernard Gert believes that the concept of beneficence has no moral rules but only moral ideals that prevent people from causing harm. Gert believes that the goal of morality is to lessen evil but not to promote good. Rationality may help to lessen evil but cannot promote eternal good.
Rorty takes his cue from the utilitarian Jeremy Bentham by presuming that all discussions on morality are firmly rooted in the individual ego. Values are therefore personal possessions. Marxism sees human nature as a “totality of social relations” and not as “idiosyncratic fantasy” (Marx 1963; Rorty, 1989 42). Rorty camouflages ideas in vague language such as the following when he explains the purpose of social organization: “the point of social organization is to let everybody have a chance at self-creation to the best of his or her abilities, and that the goal requires besides peace and wealth, the standard ‘bourgeois freedoms’” (Rorty, 1989 84). There is too much personal choice in the phrase “to the best of his or her abilities.” The statement does not acknowledge the constraints placed by society on individual effort. Charles Taylor believes that most of Enlightenment utilitarianism takes up an unacknowledged moral position because it is primarily interested to debunk moral statements which it sees as arising from religious authority (Rorty, Sources of the Self 339-40).
Rawls’ principles of justice enunciated in A Theory of Justice are libertarian and egalitarian. His principles include equal liberty and greatest social and economic benefits to the least advantaged. He introduces the concept of ‘difference principle’ which advocates giving more power to the underprivileged in terms of income and status. He discusses the socialist idea of distributive justice where responsibilities in society are distributed according to ability and benefits. Martha C. Nussbaum develops Rawls theory further by incorporating Amatya Sen’s idea of substantial freedom and argues that opportunities have to be real supported by governmentality which direct political institutions to allow everyone to participate in political discussion and shape their own lives (Nussbaum, Women and Human Development). She adds that both citizens and governments must be made to commit to create a threshold of real opportunities.
DERRIDA’S PUZZLES
Towards the end of his life Derrida was relatively preoccupied with philosophical impasses, social paradoxes and irresolvable puzzles, what today we term as “possible aporias-impossible aporias.” Aporias or puzzles have affected our important social rituals such as hospitality, forgiving and mourning where the conditions that make them possible are the very conditions that negate their possibility. Derrida interrogates these rituals to see if they possess ideal authenticity.
Derrida not only problematizes the simple social and personal acts of giving gifts, forgiveness mourning and hospitality. He reveals that these acts are never completely genuine. It is only in their denial that they achieve authenticity. There is an aporia, a paradox, in them that deny their authenticity. Perhaps Derrida’s interrogation is born out of his own sense of discrimination and loss. He questions the totalizing vocabularies of the Enlightenment and the moral and humanistic tradition of our times. His attempt is not to debunk these important practices but to open them up to see their paradoxical positions. Such knowledge would allow us to act responsibly.
Responsibility is the key component in his interrogation. It is rather naive to assume that debunking is the only post-modern condition of philosophy. Derrida wants to show that our certitudes are not stable, that there are paradoxes embedded in our beliefs and assumptions. Aporias therefore leave us with a discourse that is at once informative and puzzling.
THE GIFT
In Given Time Derrida argues that a authentic gift must escape the oppositional logic of giving and receiving and must transcend self interest or rational calculation. A gift cannot just appear by itself as it will soon be cancelled out by a recompense or equivalence. Even the mere knowledge of a gift will destroy it being termed as a gift. A simple ‘thank you’ cancels a gift by acknowledging its presence and suggesting equivalence. ‘Thank you’ suggests the erasure of indebtedness to the giver and the conclusion of the act. Else a cycle of receiving and giving begins to operate following the logic of one good deed deserves another. A gift often functions as a command to respond; the receiver is expected to acknowledge the giver. A gift can be manipulated for personal advantage and then cancels its original purpose altogether. It may be rather difficult to give without gaining some psychological satisfaction but Derrida is not analyzing the psychological issues connected with the ego. He is merely questioning the process of giving and receiving an authentic gift.
An authentic gift must be anonymous without the slightest hint of getting something in return. The person who gives should not realize that he has given a gift—let not your left hand know what your right hand has given. He should not be in a position to congratulate himself of his goodness. A genuine gift involves the separation of the self from the other and that makes the giving of an authentic gift almost impossible. For Derrida the existential problem of gift giving is this: it is impossible to realize unconditional philanthropy. The incommensurable nature of authentic giving and receiving escapes the dialectic of amalgamation. In brief, though we look for genuine giving, the act always eludes us.
HOSPITALITY
It is impossible to practice authentic hospitality before strangers. Absolute hospitality involves the giving of everything we possess to others and the difficulty of doing so. Within this tension the concept of hospitality is afloat. In order to give you must possess something to give—house, country, nation—and that involves control or mastery. Hospitality is a function of power which requires ownership of property, some sort of dominant identity, some sort of power over the hosted. If the hosted uses force to occupy the host’s house then the ritual of hospitality ends and the logic of forced occupancy punishable by law comes into existence. In wider terms this involves closing of borders and excluding certain ethnic groups. Hospitality selects some to be included in the hospitality ritual but simultaneously excludes others classifying them as ‘aliens’ or ‘refuges.’ The placing of limit or invoking trespass makes hospitality inhospitable. Hospitality without conditions implies welcoming everyone and relinquishing property claims. This seems as impossible hospitality. But if you allow this condition to occur then the notion of hospitality gets erased as the host does not exist.
FORGIVENESS
It is impossible to really forgive the unforgivable—a mortal sin for example (Derrida, On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness 32). If we can forgive something then it is actually forgivable. This forgiving is based on our reason. In effect we do not genuinely forgive. Forgiving involves a kind of madness, an unconscious act that functions outside the framework of political or legal rationality. Forgiveness may involve an unconditional clemency without seeking apology from the guilty person, though a tension between conditional forgiveness and apology may exist. This process is evident in amnesty and reconciliation and does not therefore constitute genuine forgiveness. Derrida reveals an inherent paradox, an eternal rupture, in the entire process of forgiveness that cannot be resolved as it depends upon the separation of self from the other. Derrida argues that, “genuine forgiveness must engage two singularities: the guilty and the victim. As soon as a third party intervenes, one can again speak of amnesty, reconciliation, reparation, etc., but certainly not of forgiveness in the strict sense” (Derrida, On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness 42).
Derrida points out that it is not possible to imagine a face-to-face encounter without the mediation of a third party—even when the third party is language itself—then the empirical paradox acquires the condition of aporia. Absolute forgiveness requires a direct involvement of the self with the other, while mediation breaches this category. If we know of the motive of the other person through language or a third party than genuine forgiveness is not possible. Though this impasse may not be overcome evaluating both sides is the only responsible action.
MOURNING
Derrida’s interrogation of mourning is born out of the pain of losing a friend in Paul de Man and the latter’s Nazi affiliation. A successful mourning is never possible as the other is interiorized and becomes a part of us. Since the other loses his indisputable alterity a complete mourning does not take place. The refusal to mourn successfully prolongs the alterity of the other—“an aborted interiorisation is at the same time a respect for the other as other” (Derrida, Mourning DeMann 6). In a sense a successful morning is the condition when we are unable to mourn—“success fails, failure succeeds.”
In “Fors” Derrida expands upon his concept of mourning with some help from post-Freudian theories. He distinguishes between introjections which implies the “love for the other in me” and incorporation which means retaining the other as within one’s own body. Derrida agrees with Freud, Abraham and Toruk successful morning involves introjections of the other but he does not valorize this process—the more the self “keeps the foreign element inside itself the more it excludes it” (Derrida, Fors xvii). Incorporation invariably turns pathological but retains the alterity of the other. Derrida’s loss is the loss of exchange and the opportunity of transformation de Mann presented. In the process of mourning the “otherness of the other” opposes both introjection and incorporation. We must therefore emphasize both respect for and resistance to the other (Derrida, Mémoires: for Paul de Man 160, 238).
We reject the ethical paradigm and reorganize another structure not against incommensurable but the deficiency of its internal logic. In Structures of Scientific Revolutions published in 1962 Thomas Kuhn suggests that a paradigm is rejected not from the outside but for reasons that arise from within it. Kant warned us in his The Critique of Pure Reason that everything would come under the ambit of criticism and reason: “Our age is, in especial degree, the age of criticism, and to criticism everything must submit.” What is important for the interrogation of both ethics and the self is to go beyond egoism, altruism and the “religiosity of the self” (Levinas, Otherwise Than Being Or Beyond Essence 117). We can take a leaf from Levinas when he says that the self can be free in its being when it decides “not to be.”
Works Cited
ATTRIDGE, ed. Acts of Literature. New York: Routledge, 1992.
BRAULT AND NAAS TRANS. Adieu to Emmanuel Lévinas. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1999.
CORNELL, CARLSON AND BENJAMIN EDS. Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice, (inc. “Force of the Law”). New York: Routledge, 1992.
DERRIDA, JACQUES AND DOFOURMANTELLE, A. Of Hospitality, trans. Bowlby, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000.
________. Circumfessions: Fifty Nine Periphrases, in Bennington, G., Jacques Derrida, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993.
________. Dissemination. trans. Johnson, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981.
________. Politics of Friendship, trans. Collins, New York: Verso, 1997.
________. Positions, trans. Bass, London: Athlone Press, 1981.
________. Spectres of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International, trans. Kamuf, New York: Routledge, 1994.
________. The Ear of the Other: Otobiography, Transference, Translation, trans. Kamuf, ed. McDonald, New York: Schocken Books, 1985.
________. The Gift of Death, trans. Wills, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995.
________. The Work of Mourning, eds. Brault & Naas, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001.
________. Writing and Difference, trans. Bass, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978.
________. ‘Speech and Phenomena’ and Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs, trans. Allison, Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973.
________. “Fors: The Anglish Words of Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok”, trans. Johnson, in The Wolfman’s Magic Word: A Cryptonomy, Abraham, N., & Torok, M., trans. Rand, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986.
________. “Hostipitality” in Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities, Vol. 5, Number 3, Dec 2000.
________. “Le Toucher: Touch/to touch him”, in Paragraph, trans. Kamuf, 16:2, 1993, p 122-57.
________. “Nietzsche and the Machine: Interview with Jacques Derrida” (interviewer Beardsworth) in Journal of Nietzsche Studies, Issue 7, Spring 1994 (NM). Of Grammatology, trans. Spivak, Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1976.
________. “Ousia and Gramme: A Note to a Footnote in Being and Time” trans. Casey in Phenomenology in Perspective, ed. Smith, The Hague: Nijhoff, 1970.
________. “Psyche: Inventions of the Other” in Reading De Man Reading, eds. Waters & Godzich, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989.
________. “‘Eating Well’ or the Calculation of the Subject: An Interview with Jacques Derrida” in Who Comes After the Subject? eds. Cadava, Connor, & Nancy, New York: Routledge, 1991, p 96-119.
________. Edmund Husserl’s ‘Origin of Geometry’: An Introduction. trans. Leavey, Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1978 (1962).
________. Given Time: i. Counterfeit Money, trans. Kamuf, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992.
________. Le Toucher: Jean-Luc Nancy, Paris: Galilée, 2000.
________. Limited Inc. (inc. “Afterword”), ed. Graff, trans. Weber, Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1998.
________. Margins of Philosophy, trans. Bass, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982.
________. Mémoires: for Paul de Man. trans. Lindsay, Culler, Cadava, & Kamuf, New York: Columbia University Press, 1989.
________. Memoirs of the Blind: The Self-Portrait and Other Ruins, trans. Brault & Naas, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993.
________. Monolingualism of the Other or the Prosthesis of Origin, trans. Mensh, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996.
________. On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness. London: Routledge, 2001.
________. On the Name (inc. “Passions”). ed. Dutoit, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995.
________. Parages, Paris: Galilée, 1986. Points… Interviews, 1974-1995, ed. Weber, trans. Kamuf et al, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995.
FOUCAULT, MICHEL “On the Genealogy of Ethics: An Overview of Work in Progress,” in Rainbow, ed. The Foucault Reader. New York: Pantheon, 1984.
GERT, BERNARD. Morality. New York : Oxford University Press, 2005.
LEVINAS, EMMANUEL. Otherwise Than Being Or Beyond Essence. Alphonso Lingis trans. Pittsburg: Duquesne University Press, 1999.
MARX, KARL. Karl Marx: Selected Writings in Sociology and Social Philosophy. trans T. B. Bottomore, ed. T. B. Bottomore and M. Rubel. London: Penguin Books, 1963.
NUSSBAUM, MARTHA C. Women and Human Development. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.
RAWLS, JOHN. A Theory of Justice. Harvard University Press, 1971.
RORTY, RICHARD. Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989.
TAYLOR, CHARLES. "The Dialogical Self" in The Interpretive Turn edited by David R. Hiley and others. New York: Cornell University Press, 1991: 304-14.
________. "Rorty in the Epistemological Tradition" in Reading Rorty, edited by Alan Malachowski. Cambridge: Basil Blackwell, 1990: 339-64.
________. Consequences of Pragmatism. Minneapolis: University of Minessota Press, 1982.
________. Essays on Heidegger and Others: Philosophical Papers v 2. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.
________. Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989.
________. The Ethics of Authenticity. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991.
________.Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth: Philosophical Papers, v. 1. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.
Saturday, July 3, 2010
FRAMING SOME QUESTIONS
© Mukesh Williams
1. Who has the right to ask a question and why?
In an age which is increasingly questioning privilege and authority, how can we find a common yardstick to define the right to ask a question? Do individuals, nations, communities or philosophies possess this right? If so why? Is asking a question a discursive strategy or a more fundamental issue of authority and rights? If we decenter or ‘liquidate’ the subject as Lacan said, then can we ask the question? Heidegger felt that there was subjectivity in questioning. But if subjectivity goes away from philosophy would philosophy come to an end and with it all questioning?
2. Is it possible for human beings to share worldviews, values, sensibilities and global futures?
Today globalization and its accompanied discourses of immigration and change have brought together economies, nations and communities closer and yet values, sensibilities, worldviews and global futures have acquired a deeper schism. There are more contentious debates between the rich north and the poor south about controlling the resources of the world. There are debates about clash of civilization theories and return to an ideal past.
3. Can local communities coexist with global societies?
As the world becomes increasingly complex, both local and global forces shape our lives and identity in often incompatible ways. Can we retain our old tribal and communal loyalties and yet act globally? Can we inherit the benefits of modernity and still function effectively within our traditional ethos?
4. Can we overcome the dichotomy of body and mind?
Symbiotic philosophies like Buddhism suggest that oneness of body and mind is possible, while neuroscience is discovering that it is difficult to resolve this dichotomy.
5. Is the concept of human freedom compatible with scientific discoveries of the mind?
If we are free agents we are responsible for our actions but if we are not then can we be responsible for our actions?
6. Is the universe organized only in bits and parts or there is a comprehensive scheme that is hidden from us?
This is an age-old problem expounded by T. E. Hulme and others who believe that the universe has no pattern but we place a pattern on it. We organize the world in parts, the rest is burning cinders. However the Kantians and the foundationalists disagree.
7. On what should we depend to answer the questions: Who am I? Or who are we?
The 1960s was a momentous decade. Lacan began to attack the concept of the embedded self and posited the notion of a de-centered self. The dominant theory thesis and hegemonic ideas connected with it began to give way to micro politics. By 1970s it became rather difficult to say, both on the individual and group level, “Who am I? or Who are we?” As we go into the 1980s again new groups are formed such as Yuppies and DINKS. Identity was no longer what we learn or experience but something to be consumed and used. The consumer culture acquired greater intensity during this decade. Today it is difficult to assert an ‘authentic identity’ as postmodernism undercuts modern history, psychology and philosophy. Cloning, genetic tinkering and transforming memory has further destabilized our conception of who are we.
8. How to find the right information in an age of information glut?
Information has spread rapidly like a web of knowledge breaking the hierarchical modernist framework of top down flow. We now float in a world of information but have a problem to find reliable knowledge. We need new skills and techniques to find what is reliable and accurate. Can we do it?
9. Can we retain hundred percent intellectual property rights in an age of plagiarism, intermixing and amalgamation of knowledge?
Today when information and ideas spread quickly, we still talk about retaining hundred percent IPR. Can we share 40 percent free and charge on the rest?
10. Can we discover ideal ground to make collective decisions and arrive at rational consensus?
Since World War II we have promoted the idea of collective decision making and rational consensus through the UN and Bretton Woods institutions but failed? Are there global standards of rationality and collective decision-making beyond partisan politics and self-interest? Can postmodern philosophy show the way?
11. Can we arrive at a consensus at defining universal justice?
This is distinctively a hegemonic idea, a function of a unipolar politics of the 21st century. However everyone would like to know if the answer would come from philosophy, religion or sheer brute strength of nations? We live in an unequal world and if so can we find a universal definition of justice? Thomas Hobbes believed that justice cannot be achieved outside the nation state. John Rawls would like us to believe that justice involves a notion of equality amongst people living in a nation state. It does not apply to the choices individuals make. An ideal world must have ideal institutions and ideal nation states to realize ideal universal justice.
1. Who has the right to ask a question and why?
In an age which is increasingly questioning privilege and authority, how can we find a common yardstick to define the right to ask a question? Do individuals, nations, communities or philosophies possess this right? If so why? Is asking a question a discursive strategy or a more fundamental issue of authority and rights? If we decenter or ‘liquidate’ the subject as Lacan said, then can we ask the question? Heidegger felt that there was subjectivity in questioning. But if subjectivity goes away from philosophy would philosophy come to an end and with it all questioning?
2. Is it possible for human beings to share worldviews, values, sensibilities and global futures?
Today globalization and its accompanied discourses of immigration and change have brought together economies, nations and communities closer and yet values, sensibilities, worldviews and global futures have acquired a deeper schism. There are more contentious debates between the rich north and the poor south about controlling the resources of the world. There are debates about clash of civilization theories and return to an ideal past.
3. Can local communities coexist with global societies?
As the world becomes increasingly complex, both local and global forces shape our lives and identity in often incompatible ways. Can we retain our old tribal and communal loyalties and yet act globally? Can we inherit the benefits of modernity and still function effectively within our traditional ethos?
4. Can we overcome the dichotomy of body and mind?
Symbiotic philosophies like Buddhism suggest that oneness of body and mind is possible, while neuroscience is discovering that it is difficult to resolve this dichotomy.
5. Is the concept of human freedom compatible with scientific discoveries of the mind?
If we are free agents we are responsible for our actions but if we are not then can we be responsible for our actions?
6. Is the universe organized only in bits and parts or there is a comprehensive scheme that is hidden from us?
This is an age-old problem expounded by T. E. Hulme and others who believe that the universe has no pattern but we place a pattern on it. We organize the world in parts, the rest is burning cinders. However the Kantians and the foundationalists disagree.
7. On what should we depend to answer the questions: Who am I? Or who are we?
The 1960s was a momentous decade. Lacan began to attack the concept of the embedded self and posited the notion of a de-centered self. The dominant theory thesis and hegemonic ideas connected with it began to give way to micro politics. By 1970s it became rather difficult to say, both on the individual and group level, “Who am I? or Who are we?” As we go into the 1980s again new groups are formed such as Yuppies and DINKS. Identity was no longer what we learn or experience but something to be consumed and used. The consumer culture acquired greater intensity during this decade. Today it is difficult to assert an ‘authentic identity’ as postmodernism undercuts modern history, psychology and philosophy. Cloning, genetic tinkering and transforming memory has further destabilized our conception of who are we.
8. How to find the right information in an age of information glut?
Information has spread rapidly like a web of knowledge breaking the hierarchical modernist framework of top down flow. We now float in a world of information but have a problem to find reliable knowledge. We need new skills and techniques to find what is reliable and accurate. Can we do it?
9. Can we retain hundred percent intellectual property rights in an age of plagiarism, intermixing and amalgamation of knowledge?
Today when information and ideas spread quickly, we still talk about retaining hundred percent IPR. Can we share 40 percent free and charge on the rest?
10. Can we discover ideal ground to make collective decisions and arrive at rational consensus?
Since World War II we have promoted the idea of collective decision making and rational consensus through the UN and Bretton Woods institutions but failed? Are there global standards of rationality and collective decision-making beyond partisan politics and self-interest? Can postmodern philosophy show the way?
11. Can we arrive at a consensus at defining universal justice?
This is distinctively a hegemonic idea, a function of a unipolar politics of the 21st century. However everyone would like to know if the answer would come from philosophy, religion or sheer brute strength of nations? We live in an unequal world and if so can we find a universal definition of justice? Thomas Hobbes believed that justice cannot be achieved outside the nation state. John Rawls would like us to believe that justice involves a notion of equality amongst people living in a nation state. It does not apply to the choices individuals make. An ideal world must have ideal institutions and ideal nation states to realize ideal universal justice.
Monday, June 14, 2010
Master Discourse
The Power of Master Discourse
Four Statements of Michel Foucault
"The imaginary is not formed in opposition to reality as its denial or compensation; it grows among signs, from book to book, in the interstice of repetitions and commentaries; it is born and takes shape in the interval between books. It is the phenomena of the library."
"Justice must always question itself, just as society can exist only by means of the work it does on itself and on its institutions."
"The imaginary is not formed in opposition to reality as its denial or compensation; it grows among signs, from book to book, in the interstice of repetitions and commentaries; it is born and takes shape in the interval between books. It is the phenomena of the library."
"The work of an intellectual is not to mould the political will of others; it is, through the analyses that he does in his own field, to re-examine evidence and assumptions, to shake up habitual ways of working and thinking, to dissipate conventional familiarities, to re-evaluate rules and institutions and to participate in the formation of a political will (where he has his role as citizen to play)."
© 2010 Mukesh Williams
From time immemorial human beings have been fond of telling stories to each other. They have imagined their fears, anxieties, dreams, and have expressed them through words into a composite whole. From childhood to old age we are influenced by stories. We reject some stories as untrue and we accept some stories as true. There are, however, stories we accept tacitly without even analyzing such as “everyone must work hard” or “we are always progressing towards a better future.” Michael Foucault was the first thinker to unravel the power of such stories and their impact on our lives. He called these stories narratives and divided them into master narrative, minor narrative and counter narratives.
MASTER NARRATIVES
Master narratives are most powerful. They are the controlling discourses of modern societies, discourses such as self, ego, gender, class, race and nation. Though they are mostly imagined and constructed through language and signs they in due course acquire a social sanction and legality hard to refute or deny. They provide enormous benefits to the individual when they are followed and punishment when infringed.
Master narratives tell us that we are separate individuals and that our interests are often in opposition to others. The games we play when young teach us to win and take all. We are told not to help others in a competition as it breaks the rule. Winning in life matters and this is further reinforced by T.V. programs where winners are celebrated. We love competition. Our perceptions and language does not connect us with nature and with others but instead separates us from them. We do feel that love gives us happiness.
DERRIDA AND THE POWER OF LANGUAGE
Derrida tells us about the power of language. Language reinforces the separate self. It represents everything including ourselves as objects. Language uses signs and signs define objects against each other. White is understood against black. Our first personal narratives define boundaries through personal pronouns such as I, me and mine. These pronouns are different from you and yours.
Culture and society curtail our construction of an autonomous, free self. Though we use out skills, accomplishments, possessions and appearance to create ourselves in opposition to others, it leaves us dissatisfied as we feel we can do better or worse others can do better than us. Master narratives do not clearly define a referent to us which is in the final analysis no other than ourselves. On the one hand we are separate from others and on the other we are intrinsically connected to others. We depend on others for warmth, sustenance and support. Our DNA is connected to others. Our cells do not compete but cooperate.
THE DISCOURSE OF INDIVIDUALITY
Individuality is of recent origin. Before the eighteenth century, pre-modern Europe did not see individuality in a positive light. The medieval world saw a preordained hierarchy of kings, feudal lords and church functionaries running the world. This divine worldview was rigidly enforced and you did what your status allowed you to do. Your position in society was predetermined. If anything individual identity worked against you. The eighteenth century writers brought in reason and tried to decenter the master narrative of European aristocracy. The age of democracy developed the concept of the self and gave right to everyone to acquire power. Individualism became more powerful and began to involve creativity, autonomy and a unique personality. But events in Europe such as the Holocaust and existentialism revealed that we cannot escape our moral responsibility and freedom of choice. Even in mature democracies we find that our liberty and freedom are curtailed. Money and politics undermine democracy.
We believe that our understanding of a separate self is associated with notions of freedom and happiness. The notion of individuality though linked to free society and democracy has been forged in the fire of bloody revolutions which in turn has been influenced by counterrevolutions. Though we feel we are free individuals but we fail to create the world we envision. We also believe that competition is healthy. Freud legitimized the idea of the ego and our selfish motives. We feel that everyone must serve us and our needs. When we are infants we just live to satisfy our needs, functioning within an id. Gradually we develop a superego which stands for society. If we can successfully negotiate between id, ego and superego we can lead a healthy life; we can self-evaluate ourselves and self-improve ourselves regularly. The Freudian narrative continues to explain our separate selves as given and legitimate.
Foucault shows us that the ego narrative creates a psychological discourse that both limits and manipulates our freedom. Advertising, marketing and business strategies use methods to create desires and then force us to fulfill them. We think that we are free agents making informed choices. When we imagine ourselves as egos we see everything as an accessory to be used and do not find happiness in connecting with nature or others. Though we do not like to be called egoistic or selfish but in truth we are. As long as we believe that our self is separate from others we cannot but be self-centered.
The master narrative of the ego which is just an imagined idea sees others as objects either helping us in our goals or hindering us. We try to control others, denying them identity or personhood. We understand ego narratives to encompass group identity such as social cliques, tribes and nations and then construct our own sense of superiority and other’s inferiority. At the center of these identities are mental constructions comprising of words. We can create a world, which conforms better to our goals and aspirations.
GENDER ROLES
Gender is the fundamental expression of the ego narrative. Though gender undoubtedly has biological base it is predominantly cultural in nature. Gender generates different responses in people and a lot of it is inherited through language and socialization. We treat boys and girls differently. We hold boys facing outward and girls facing towards us, telling them how they should play their roles in society. Boys will find a place for themselves in the outer world, girls in the inner world. Blue blankets are for boys, pink for girls. Guns and tools are for boys; pretend jewelry and dolls for girls. The feminist movement beginning in the 1950s with Betty Freidan’s The Feminine Mystique defined new gender roles for women. The slogan personal is political took women out into the market place and led them to self-actualize themselves. The Feminist movement of the 1970s tried to show that gender roles were more cultural than biological in nature. Women now acquired the foresight to become lawyers, scientists and teachers.
Obviously males and females are different but culture defines their roles more sharply. Most cultures spend more time in gender socialization. The master narrative tells us that males are expected to dominate women. Boys are therefore allowed to be aggressive, they are persuaded not to cry or be sissy. Women need love and companionship. The problem is that men too need the same. Western literature is filled with the heroic figure of the solitary male hero who seeks to conquer the world alone. We are told that only men face the problem of bonding with other males. Women by nature find it easier to bond with others.
The female narrative grows upon the notion that the feminine ideal embraces the male ego and, therefore, is the very opposite. Hiding below the feminine pursuit of beauty, pleasure and love for baubles is the feminine ideal of service, cooperation and communication. Early in life girls are taught to be cute, speak cheerfully and act caring. The stories told to girls and the games they are expected to play deal with romance and motherly love. They play with dolls to learn the art of mothering and later in life read romantic stories to find a prince charming. From their seniors, such as mother, sisters and friends, they learn to be seductive and by the time they are ready to marry they have become adept in playing psychological, domestic and sexual roles.
We often do not recognize that sexual morality and reproductive function embrace a created language of gender. There is no hierarchy in morality or biology. Male and female both work together to give birth to a child and there is no hierarchy in reproduction. The narrative of dominance does not help us to understand the intimate and the erotic in human relationships. The ego prevents us to participate freely in the emotions of ecstasy, wonder and beauty.
The female narrative also includes a separation of self and belief in order to win in society. Though women do not usually resort to violence they compete quite aggressively to become desirable as a woman or a mother. They also look for success by wearing alluring clothes and wanting an expensive house. They also compete with men in workplace and can ‘play the game’ of currying favor with their boss with equal finesse.
The Victorian model of morality and sexual ethics had once placed strict social control on the behavior of men and women. Promiscuity in men and coquetry in women were reproached. Though sexual behavior per se was freed from social control in the twentieth century we still feel sexual repression. Our heterosexual bias still plays a big role in determining our sexual preferences. We still have not been able to accept same sex love or other sexual relationships which we consider ‘abnormalities.’
SOCIAL CLASS
Social class constitutes another category of the master narrative. It believes in the survival of the fittest in society and has given greater preference to self-interest than to altruism. Biology however teaches us that cooperation amongst proteins is the key to the survival of living organisms. Our knowledge and belief teach us that we should take as much from nature as we can. The belief that our lives are separate from our surroundings allows us to take everything. Altruism is seen as a foolish thing. Only recently we have come to realize that nature is hitting back at us through global warming and climate change.
The ego narrative also creates an economic system based on the primacy of money and directed by self-achievement. The word economics comes fro the Greek word ekos and nomos which mean the rules of the house. House rules determine our economic relations and are therefore created by us. If we change our house rules (for example in communism) but do not change our master narrative of the ego we will not go far. Communism preaches that individuals can create their own rules through violent revolutions but since the ego narrative remains in communism, it provides a new hierarchy of corruption and economic inequality. However that does not mean that the home rule of capitalism or free enterprise is any better either.
Money decides who lives and who dies, who eats and who goes hungry, who gets education, health care and employment and who remains illiterate, sick and unemployed. Money also decides who can travel and enjoy life and who cannot. The narrative creates a moral climate that allows us to enjoy life without bothering about the poor and down trodden. The free market economy reminds us that by nature we are lazy. So greed is wonderful. The force that helps us over come our laziness is fear. Middle class fear the loss of their livelihood if they do not work hard while the upper class their position. The ego pushes us to get more in order to succeed, but still we need admiration and esteem. We acquire goods to satisfy our desire and get the admiration of others.
We rarely find democratic functioning of institutions. Instead we see people using social position and family connections to succeed. The ego narrative works against all principles of enlightenment. It works for personal gain against the common good. In terms of global relations ego gets translated into economic egoism of developed versus developing nations. Multinational organization use poor countries as a source of cheap labor and refuse bin for toxic wastes.
RACE
The master narrative of race gets linked to the ego narrative and tends to exploit others more savagely. Slavery had a great effect on the narrative of race. Africans and Europeans had a history of slavery in their own geographical regions for a long time. The development of maritime trade made possible the growth of inter-regional and intercontinental slavery. Once trading in black slaves began an attempt to justify such trade through scientific racism, eugenics or anthropology also began.
We do not just psychologically imagined Freudian egos but also biological agents looking for emotional comfort and a sense of community. Our post-Enlightenment culture reminds us through the constitutions that we are all equal—“we hold these truths to be self-evident.” Though on a fundamental level we believe that everyone is equal and that birthright does not count, we still see a different truth in the functioning of governments and social systems.
CONCLUSION
Through master narratives, especially through religious discourses and linguistic paradigms we perceive the world as a place, a terra firma, and the cosmos as the result of some first cause. We call it power, God or force. To be engaged with a subject whose subjectivity is greater than ours leads us into a reference area outside time, space, reason and human understanding. By the late seventeenth century a reaction set in against the kind of religious model. A new secular model used scientific evidence and logic to explain a new cosmology that conformed to human inquiry and laws. In Argument of the Second Epistle Alexander Pope asserted, “Know then thyself, presume not God to scan/The proper study of Mankind is Man.” Now the world of nature was seen as a big machine. Therefore a theory could be developed which could predict and control everything that happened in the future.
The secular model builds a moral world based on Emmanuel Kant’s notion of categorical imperative which posits a universal standard for individual behavior. Though this ethical principle keeps egoism in check by condemning corruption and deceit, it nonetheless perpetuates inequalities by allowing free competition and the victor take all syndrome. Scientific discourses teach us that nature does not function with a mind and we have no responsibility for the various problems of the world. Everything follows a certain law and we are not free to make a moral choice. Obviously all this is changing now. Both the Nobel Prize Committee and the Australian electorate are choosing people who highlight our responsibility for protecting nature. But these two paradigms are more intertwined than separate. There are post modern secularists who believe in the existence of radical evil and pre-modern religionists accepting democracy and human rights. National discourses also prevent us from seeing our larger identity as members of the planet earth.
The ego is more imagined than real. It is more cultural than biological. In the words of Jean-Paul Sartre our ego depends on our consciousness and not the other way round. Both Foucault and Derrida unraveled the mysteries of the master narratives and decentered them for us. If we can change our notion of the ego and pick up other non-ego narratives can have more freedom and be happier.
Representing India: Literature, Politics and Identities
Four Statements of Michel Foucault
"The imaginary is not formed in opposition to reality as its denial or compensation; it grows among signs, from book to book, in the interstice of repetitions and commentaries; it is born and takes shape in the interval between books. It is the phenomena of the library."
"Justice must always question itself, just as society can exist only by means of the work it does on itself and on its institutions."
"The imaginary is not formed in opposition to reality as its denial or compensation; it grows among signs, from book to book, in the interstice of repetitions and commentaries; it is born and takes shape in the interval between books. It is the phenomena of the library."
"The work of an intellectual is not to mould the political will of others; it is, through the analyses that he does in his own field, to re-examine evidence and assumptions, to shake up habitual ways of working and thinking, to dissipate conventional familiarities, to re-evaluate rules and institutions and to participate in the formation of a political will (where he has his role as citizen to play)."
© 2010 Mukesh Williams
From time immemorial human beings have been fond of telling stories to each other. They have imagined their fears, anxieties, dreams, and have expressed them through words into a composite whole. From childhood to old age we are influenced by stories. We reject some stories as untrue and we accept some stories as true. There are, however, stories we accept tacitly without even analyzing such as “everyone must work hard” or “we are always progressing towards a better future.” Michael Foucault was the first thinker to unravel the power of such stories and their impact on our lives. He called these stories narratives and divided them into master narrative, minor narrative and counter narratives.
MASTER NARRATIVES
Master narratives are most powerful. They are the controlling discourses of modern societies, discourses such as self, ego, gender, class, race and nation. Though they are mostly imagined and constructed through language and signs they in due course acquire a social sanction and legality hard to refute or deny. They provide enormous benefits to the individual when they are followed and punishment when infringed.
Master narratives tell us that we are separate individuals and that our interests are often in opposition to others. The games we play when young teach us to win and take all. We are told not to help others in a competition as it breaks the rule. Winning in life matters and this is further reinforced by T.V. programs where winners are celebrated. We love competition. Our perceptions and language does not connect us with nature and with others but instead separates us from them. We do feel that love gives us happiness.
DERRIDA AND THE POWER OF LANGUAGE
Derrida tells us about the power of language. Language reinforces the separate self. It represents everything including ourselves as objects. Language uses signs and signs define objects against each other. White is understood against black. Our first personal narratives define boundaries through personal pronouns such as I, me and mine. These pronouns are different from you and yours.
Culture and society curtail our construction of an autonomous, free self. Though we use out skills, accomplishments, possessions and appearance to create ourselves in opposition to others, it leaves us dissatisfied as we feel we can do better or worse others can do better than us. Master narratives do not clearly define a referent to us which is in the final analysis no other than ourselves. On the one hand we are separate from others and on the other we are intrinsically connected to others. We depend on others for warmth, sustenance and support. Our DNA is connected to others. Our cells do not compete but cooperate.
THE DISCOURSE OF INDIVIDUALITY
Individuality is of recent origin. Before the eighteenth century, pre-modern Europe did not see individuality in a positive light. The medieval world saw a preordained hierarchy of kings, feudal lords and church functionaries running the world. This divine worldview was rigidly enforced and you did what your status allowed you to do. Your position in society was predetermined. If anything individual identity worked against you. The eighteenth century writers brought in reason and tried to decenter the master narrative of European aristocracy. The age of democracy developed the concept of the self and gave right to everyone to acquire power. Individualism became more powerful and began to involve creativity, autonomy and a unique personality. But events in Europe such as the Holocaust and existentialism revealed that we cannot escape our moral responsibility and freedom of choice. Even in mature democracies we find that our liberty and freedom are curtailed. Money and politics undermine democracy.
We believe that our understanding of a separate self is associated with notions of freedom and happiness. The notion of individuality though linked to free society and democracy has been forged in the fire of bloody revolutions which in turn has been influenced by counterrevolutions. Though we feel we are free individuals but we fail to create the world we envision. We also believe that competition is healthy. Freud legitimized the idea of the ego and our selfish motives. We feel that everyone must serve us and our needs. When we are infants we just live to satisfy our needs, functioning within an id. Gradually we develop a superego which stands for society. If we can successfully negotiate between id, ego and superego we can lead a healthy life; we can self-evaluate ourselves and self-improve ourselves regularly. The Freudian narrative continues to explain our separate selves as given and legitimate.
Foucault shows us that the ego narrative creates a psychological discourse that both limits and manipulates our freedom. Advertising, marketing and business strategies use methods to create desires and then force us to fulfill them. We think that we are free agents making informed choices. When we imagine ourselves as egos we see everything as an accessory to be used and do not find happiness in connecting with nature or others. Though we do not like to be called egoistic or selfish but in truth we are. As long as we believe that our self is separate from others we cannot but be self-centered.
The master narrative of the ego which is just an imagined idea sees others as objects either helping us in our goals or hindering us. We try to control others, denying them identity or personhood. We understand ego narratives to encompass group identity such as social cliques, tribes and nations and then construct our own sense of superiority and other’s inferiority. At the center of these identities are mental constructions comprising of words. We can create a world, which conforms better to our goals and aspirations.
GENDER ROLES
Gender is the fundamental expression of the ego narrative. Though gender undoubtedly has biological base it is predominantly cultural in nature. Gender generates different responses in people and a lot of it is inherited through language and socialization. We treat boys and girls differently. We hold boys facing outward and girls facing towards us, telling them how they should play their roles in society. Boys will find a place for themselves in the outer world, girls in the inner world. Blue blankets are for boys, pink for girls. Guns and tools are for boys; pretend jewelry and dolls for girls. The feminist movement beginning in the 1950s with Betty Freidan’s The Feminine Mystique defined new gender roles for women. The slogan personal is political took women out into the market place and led them to self-actualize themselves. The Feminist movement of the 1970s tried to show that gender roles were more cultural than biological in nature. Women now acquired the foresight to become lawyers, scientists and teachers.
Obviously males and females are different but culture defines their roles more sharply. Most cultures spend more time in gender socialization. The master narrative tells us that males are expected to dominate women. Boys are therefore allowed to be aggressive, they are persuaded not to cry or be sissy. Women need love and companionship. The problem is that men too need the same. Western literature is filled with the heroic figure of the solitary male hero who seeks to conquer the world alone. We are told that only men face the problem of bonding with other males. Women by nature find it easier to bond with others.
The female narrative grows upon the notion that the feminine ideal embraces the male ego and, therefore, is the very opposite. Hiding below the feminine pursuit of beauty, pleasure and love for baubles is the feminine ideal of service, cooperation and communication. Early in life girls are taught to be cute, speak cheerfully and act caring. The stories told to girls and the games they are expected to play deal with romance and motherly love. They play with dolls to learn the art of mothering and later in life read romantic stories to find a prince charming. From their seniors, such as mother, sisters and friends, they learn to be seductive and by the time they are ready to marry they have become adept in playing psychological, domestic and sexual roles.
We often do not recognize that sexual morality and reproductive function embrace a created language of gender. There is no hierarchy in morality or biology. Male and female both work together to give birth to a child and there is no hierarchy in reproduction. The narrative of dominance does not help us to understand the intimate and the erotic in human relationships. The ego prevents us to participate freely in the emotions of ecstasy, wonder and beauty.
The female narrative also includes a separation of self and belief in order to win in society. Though women do not usually resort to violence they compete quite aggressively to become desirable as a woman or a mother. They also look for success by wearing alluring clothes and wanting an expensive house. They also compete with men in workplace and can ‘play the game’ of currying favor with their boss with equal finesse.
The Victorian model of morality and sexual ethics had once placed strict social control on the behavior of men and women. Promiscuity in men and coquetry in women were reproached. Though sexual behavior per se was freed from social control in the twentieth century we still feel sexual repression. Our heterosexual bias still plays a big role in determining our sexual preferences. We still have not been able to accept same sex love or other sexual relationships which we consider ‘abnormalities.’
SOCIAL CLASS
Social class constitutes another category of the master narrative. It believes in the survival of the fittest in society and has given greater preference to self-interest than to altruism. Biology however teaches us that cooperation amongst proteins is the key to the survival of living organisms. Our knowledge and belief teach us that we should take as much from nature as we can. The belief that our lives are separate from our surroundings allows us to take everything. Altruism is seen as a foolish thing. Only recently we have come to realize that nature is hitting back at us through global warming and climate change.
The ego narrative also creates an economic system based on the primacy of money and directed by self-achievement. The word economics comes fro the Greek word ekos and nomos which mean the rules of the house. House rules determine our economic relations and are therefore created by us. If we change our house rules (for example in communism) but do not change our master narrative of the ego we will not go far. Communism preaches that individuals can create their own rules through violent revolutions but since the ego narrative remains in communism, it provides a new hierarchy of corruption and economic inequality. However that does not mean that the home rule of capitalism or free enterprise is any better either.
Money decides who lives and who dies, who eats and who goes hungry, who gets education, health care and employment and who remains illiterate, sick and unemployed. Money also decides who can travel and enjoy life and who cannot. The narrative creates a moral climate that allows us to enjoy life without bothering about the poor and down trodden. The free market economy reminds us that by nature we are lazy. So greed is wonderful. The force that helps us over come our laziness is fear. Middle class fear the loss of their livelihood if they do not work hard while the upper class their position. The ego pushes us to get more in order to succeed, but still we need admiration and esteem. We acquire goods to satisfy our desire and get the admiration of others.
We rarely find democratic functioning of institutions. Instead we see people using social position and family connections to succeed. The ego narrative works against all principles of enlightenment. It works for personal gain against the common good. In terms of global relations ego gets translated into economic egoism of developed versus developing nations. Multinational organization use poor countries as a source of cheap labor and refuse bin for toxic wastes.
RACE
The master narrative of race gets linked to the ego narrative and tends to exploit others more savagely. Slavery had a great effect on the narrative of race. Africans and Europeans had a history of slavery in their own geographical regions for a long time. The development of maritime trade made possible the growth of inter-regional and intercontinental slavery. Once trading in black slaves began an attempt to justify such trade through scientific racism, eugenics or anthropology also began.
We do not just psychologically imagined Freudian egos but also biological agents looking for emotional comfort and a sense of community. Our post-Enlightenment culture reminds us through the constitutions that we are all equal—“we hold these truths to be self-evident.” Though on a fundamental level we believe that everyone is equal and that birthright does not count, we still see a different truth in the functioning of governments and social systems.
CONCLUSION
Through master narratives, especially through religious discourses and linguistic paradigms we perceive the world as a place, a terra firma, and the cosmos as the result of some first cause. We call it power, God or force. To be engaged with a subject whose subjectivity is greater than ours leads us into a reference area outside time, space, reason and human understanding. By the late seventeenth century a reaction set in against the kind of religious model. A new secular model used scientific evidence and logic to explain a new cosmology that conformed to human inquiry and laws. In Argument of the Second Epistle Alexander Pope asserted, “Know then thyself, presume not God to scan/The proper study of Mankind is Man.” Now the world of nature was seen as a big machine. Therefore a theory could be developed which could predict and control everything that happened in the future.
The secular model builds a moral world based on Emmanuel Kant’s notion of categorical imperative which posits a universal standard for individual behavior. Though this ethical principle keeps egoism in check by condemning corruption and deceit, it nonetheless perpetuates inequalities by allowing free competition and the victor take all syndrome. Scientific discourses teach us that nature does not function with a mind and we have no responsibility for the various problems of the world. Everything follows a certain law and we are not free to make a moral choice. Obviously all this is changing now. Both the Nobel Prize Committee and the Australian electorate are choosing people who highlight our responsibility for protecting nature. But these two paradigms are more intertwined than separate. There are post modern secularists who believe in the existence of radical evil and pre-modern religionists accepting democracy and human rights. National discourses also prevent us from seeing our larger identity as members of the planet earth.
The ego is more imagined than real. It is more cultural than biological. In the words of Jean-Paul Sartre our ego depends on our consciousness and not the other way round. Both Foucault and Derrida unraveled the mysteries of the master narratives and decentered them for us. If we can change our notion of the ego and pick up other non-ego narratives can have more freedom and be happier.
Representing India: Literature, Politics and Identities
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)