> Notice the personification of history ("jealous"). Worthless,
but typical of what passes for profound in today's universities.
-gn.
Notice the personification of today's universities as possessing something ("profound"). Worthless, but typical of what passed for critique yesterday.
Jealous History: The Return of the Repressed
>From where does the repressed return? From the future.
Consider an example from Wiener's science fiction (or even
Piers Anthony): two beings each of whose temporal
dimensions moves in the opposite direction from the other. If
one of the m sends a message to the other, for example a
square, the being going in the opposite direction will first of all
see the square vanishing, before seeing the square.
Symptoms are meaningless traces, their meaning is not discovered, excavated from the hidden depth of the past, but constructed retroactively. Every historical rupture changes retroactively the meaning of a all tradition - the past is restructured in light of the new narrative. Consider a terrible movie that one was obligated to sit through (Eyes Wide Shut?). The movie sucked while you were sitting through it. However, when someone explains to you a key insight of the film or produces a novel interpretation (the anxiety of bourgeois masculine sexuality), the experience is seen in a completely new light. All of a sudden, the memory of boredom is replaced by enthusiasm. That which meant nothing all of a sudden takes on significant worth in a different domain. Jealous history is an effect which precedes its cause (its hidden kernel, its meaning). The paradox consists of overtaking ourselves ('into the future') and then reversing the time direction ('into the past'). This is not just a subjective illusion of an objective process taking place. This supplementary snare is an internal condition of the symbolic process ("will have been"). Hegemonic discourse is an effect, the justification of hegemonic discourse is the cause, which occurs *after* hegemony has been achieved. Consider this, "What is Microsoft trying to accomplish by monopolizing the world market? What is their program?" "The program is, we're trying to monopolize the world market!" The manifesto doesn't exist until the question about the manifesto is asked.
> Carrol Cox wrote:
> > I would appreciate someone (perhaps ken himself)
translating the following -- not one phrase of which is
intelligible to me.
> > This is a moment of abstract negativity, the
epistemological mistake of treating regulative ideas as
constitutive - in other words, there is a disavowal here, a
repression - which is manifest by the reduction of the subject
to the process of subjectivization... a reduction that can only
end in terror.
Bernstein's regulative ideas stem from Habermas's pragmatic analysis of language. I suspect he is in agreement with Seyla Benhabib - that a democratic ethos entails two substantial principles: egalitarian reciprocity and universal moral respect (symmetry). Bernstein then leaps to the conclusion, implicitly I believe (since he doesn't talk about consciousness much) that the subject *is* the process of subjectivization. So he installs a *pre-political ethic* into the very idea of what it means to be a citizen in a democracy (although, again, he doesn't formulate this). A "good" citizien of a democratic ethos is both reciprocal and respectful. Here a strange twist occurs on a Kantian motif. In Kant's essay "What is enlightenment?" he notes, quickly, that is has to so with autonomous will formation. And what does this mean? It means that you must obey! This is the obscene gesture in Bernstein as well. The 'authentic' subject is both reconciled and ruptured (the reconciliation has to do with an identification with the past, the rupture has to do with the self-critical process of reflection). However, by identifying the subject with this very process, Bernstein fails to recognize that the past itself comes from the future. In failing to recognize this, that subjectivity is always constituted retractively (we don't recognize we enjoyed the experience until that experience 'makes sense'). In other words, subjectivization is a symptom, not the subject (hence, an abstract negation). The subject is not the substance of the retroactive imposition of meaning and narrative.
> > Against Bernstein's Hegelianism, the subject is
not substance! In Kantian terms: Bernstein's sublime
reconciliation and rupture turns into the monsterous, as a
jealous history takes its vengeance on future uncertainty right
here in the present. Otherwise known as the French
Revolution.
Bernstein quotes Habermas approvingly, "communicative reason operates in history as an avenging force... a stubbornly transcending power, because it is renewed with each act of unconstrained understanding..." He we have a procedure of identifying with the symptom. In essence, the particular (the respectful and reciprocal citizen) is seen as the universal (the global citizen). The failure here is the recognition that it is the subject who accomplishes the suture between the universal and the particular. There is an important difference. The universal citizen is a singular which appears to stand-in for the universal - in effect - the universal citizen, grounded in a strict adherence to the ideal of communicative action, imposes this conceptual ideal on reality. Habermas's fire and brimstone against the postmodern's and such is quite easily seen as a further symptom of this imposition. And I don't think for an instant the Woodstock '99 is not related to this kind of hegemony. In contrast to the identification of subjectivity with the process of subjectivization, we find an image of the subject as the spin doctor of hegemony, the one who 'fills in the gaps" between the universal and the particular. The subject who has not identified directly with the symptom then, recognizes their hegemonic move, and is able to take responsibility for it. And isn't *this* the political / ethical horizon of modernity and postmodernity? The subject who takes responsibility for their transgression, their failed translation of the universal into the particular.
Hope this helps, ken