Talk - 13/05/05

So the research I want to introduce today is centered around “peritrope,” of which you can see a very breif definition on the first-page of the handout, which I will just quickley read out:

Peritrope was known for many centuries primarily as a tool for refuting ancient skepticism (in Sextus Empiricus, Avicenna, and Thomas Aquinas, for example). If I make the assertion, “There is no truth,” then you can respond using peritrope by posing the rhetorical question “Well, then, isn’t that true?” It is often known as the accusation of ‘self-refutation.’ The word itself is Greek for "turning around".
First formally identified by Sextus Empiricus in a discussion of Socrates’ refutation of Protagoras, Peritrope has a long and surprisingly contiguous history in philosophy. Since peritrope is, put simply, the accusation that a philosopher has retained what he has disavowed in and by the disavowal itself, peritrope has an immediate bearing on all questions concerning the possibility of any totalized overcoming or transcendence in general. Despite this, peritrope has only received limited academic attention in recent years (mostly in the work of Barbara H. Smith, Carl Page, and Myles Burnyeat).
“a mess of an article on an idiocyncratic non-topic”

Idiosyncratic non-topic, although meant to mortally wound my article, actually goes a long a way toward developing a description of something which, though it remains itself, is at work in so many essentially different ways throughout the history of philosophy, that it can hardly be said to be a topic at all.
So you can see that immediatly the issue of the clarity or lucidity of the concept of peritrope is already at issue. But, at very least, it seems at first, peritrope must be a concept. But from the start in Sextus Empiricus, peritrope was never part of the kind of philosophy that dealt with concepts. So is it a rhetorical device, is it an idiosyncratic non-topic? This raises the question of whether the vocabulary of philosophical ‘concpets’ Ãis appropriate to a subject such as peritrope with such an enormous variety of historical incarnations and appearances. But, to complicate matters, there are moments in the history of philosophy where peritrope is treated as a kind of plain old analytic concept, as in the work of Myles Burnyeat, but there are other moments when it is literally a bodily experience,w where it is the only thing that can exorcise the malignant deceiver God from the dream of rationality, as in the Cartesian Cogito.
But just the same, as I said, it is there with unmistakeable lucidity in the earliest sceptical writings, not as a dead concept but as a living trope or a mode of being, and, most importantly for this phase of my reasearch, as the point of departure of a therapeutic method for eliminating anxiety that accompanied melancholia. (for Deleuze/ Derrida) My reasearch seeks to trace the appeareances and behaviors of peritrope from a cathartic departure point for scepticism, through its rol Êe as a defence of christian faith, to its appearance as the gauranteur of modern subjecthood in the Cartesian Cogito. Today I just want to talk a bit more about the semi-originary therapeutic role it played in ancient scepticism, to talk about some of the issues I’ve been working on recently.
For Sextus Empiricus, a Greek Alexandrian physician and the only sceptic who left a comprehensive account of his system, pyrrohnian scepticism only really gets off the ground when it turns from an interrogation of our admitidly dim sence-perceptions to a self-interrogation wherein doubt and scepticism themselves are overturned in an act of peritrope. From Outlines of Pyrrhonism, “Even in professing sceptical sayings regarding the doubtful, such as “Each thing is no more this than that” or “I determine nothing,” the sceptic still does not dogmatize. For, whereas the dogmatist lives as if his dogmas were absolutley real, the sceptic does not deliver his sayings in any absolute sence; for he knows that the saying “All is false” speaks of itself just as it s peaks of everything else, as does the saying “Nothing is true,” so the “No more” saying is itself “No more” this than that.”
The ou mallon formula is the central trope of skepticism at the time of Sextus Empiricus. Its translation and precise meaning are already at this stage at issue. Ou Mallon is the sceptical slang by which one brushes away not only all dogmatism, but the scepticism as well which calls dogmatism into question. At this point, not only sence perception and objective reality are called into doubt, but the fainomonon of skepticism itself as it flourishes in thought. The skeptic herself is immediatly and deliberatley displaced, and becomes an “object” of skepticism. No longer a beleiver in skepticism, she becomes a skeptic, in practice and in person. At this moment of thought where epistemology seems to decisivley fail, the goal of the philosophical logos itself switches from the uncovering of dogmatic truths through critical doubt (associated with the peripatetics) to an unending ther apeutic practice wherein doubt and thinking are not seen as tools for the extraction of essences (diabebaioumenos). In peritrope, when skepticism casts itself aside, i.e. when it becomes skepticism, when the doubter’s doubt is doubted by the doubter, what emerges from this reflexivity is not as we might expect the self-certainty of the Cartesian Cogito, but a hollowed out subject who no longer posesses the capacity for the kind of dogmatic critical doubt which does not also doubt itself.
Now, the larger project of skepticism is to deliver us from anxiety of human existence, through this suspencion of judgement (epoche) to a non-state of the soul known to the greeks as ataraxia, which has been translated over the centuries as quietude or freedom from worry. But the process described above is likened by Timon among other sceptics to the purgative cures associated with the treatment of melancholia. Fear and anxiety in Hypocrates and Galen are treated primarily as symptoms of melancholia, and cannot be directly treated apart from it. Scepticism, then, in its peritropic moment, tries its purgative method directly against the symptom, which at once reframes it as an ailment or cosmic imbalance. THis description of the process is from Diogenes Laertius:
Also the expression, "Every reason has a corresponding reason," &c., does in the same manner indicate the suspension of the judgment; for if, while the facts are different, the expressions are equipollent, it follows that a man must be quite ignorant of the real truth.

Besides this, to this assertion there is a contrary assertion opposed, which, after having destroyed all others, turns itself against itself, and destroys itself, resembling, as it were, those cathartic medicines which, after they have cleansed the stomach, then discharge themselves and are got rid of.
Diogenes Laertius

But this description of scepticism is directly challenged by the peripatetic philosopher Aristocles:

'It is altogether a silly thi ng, when they say, that just as cathartic drugs purge out themselves together with the excrements, in like manner the argument which maintains that all things are uncertain together with everything else destroys itself also. For supposing it to refute itself, they who use it must talk nonsense. It were better therefore for them to hold their peace, and not open their mouth at all,

'But in truth there is no similarity between the cathartic drug and their argument. For the drug is secreted and does not remain ˇ in the body: the argument, however, must be there in men's souls, as being always the same and gaining their belief, for it can be only this that makes them incapable of assent.
Aristocles quoted in Eusebius

The very nature of the healthy soul is here at issue with regard to anxiety, doubt, and knowledge. Does scepticism leave its dangerous residue in its unwitting victims when it administers itself as a purgaitve? Or does it really and truly evacuate itself, leaving the soul in state of natural health, free from the anxiety caused by insipid dogmas? Or, in other words, is the healthy soul capeable of dogmas and absolute assertions about the world and about itself? This, of course, is not a question for which skepticism can provide an answer. Or, if it does, it cannot know its answer absolutley, remaining undecided even in regard to whether it has answered. As the Democritean Metrodorus of
Chios (fourth century B.C.) said, anticipating the most important anti-dictums of both skepticism and socratic philosophy:
“We know nothing, not
even whether we know or do not know, or what it
is to know or not to know, or in general whether
anything exists or not.”

Bush and Identity

Bush Himself: Neoconservative Method and Identity

Bush Himself: Neoconservative Method and Identity
The foolhardy search for a silver lining on any of the clouds now crowding the global-political sky has led me to hope (again, I stress, foolishly) for the demise of a certain kind of large-scale planning. The absolute dominance of the unforseen in world events has led authorities of every kind - even and especially academics and journalists - into an ever-intensifying orgy of predictive hubris. The more obscure the future becomes, the more politicians, planners, and observers compulsivley try to predict it - sometimes with shocking arrogance. The recent examples of obvious and definitive failures of such large-scale predictions (on all sides in the debate surrounding the invasion and occupation of Iraq) do not seem to discourage anyone. But this is a neccessary consequence in a world where nearly everyone is wrong. We end up, as we often have, with all surviving authorities claiming predictive victory, claiming that they “knew it would happen like this.” The truth, of course, in its obvious ambiguity, defying all sides, shows itself as the essential failure of the debate. It manifests itself as the greif of survivors of global catastrophe who never had the chance to exercise an armchair (or battleroom) ‘predictive authority.’
All this might add up to the utter disgrace of the “command and control” ethics of political, cultural, and scientific expertise, if only we had not learned this very lesson on so many previous occasions over the course of the last century. Still, such lessons continue to resonante even when they seem to be forgotten. The myth of objectivity, which is the central tenet of all practical varieties of expertise, has faded more quickley in recent years - especially in the mainstream news media. We only need to think of the verbal promise of Fox News of ‘fair and balanced’ reporting- which started in 1999 as a falsity, but had become a gross irony or an ‘open lie’ by 2003. Without realizing it, this kind of ‘journalism’ has helped out and even necessitated the growth of its market nemesis in the form of blogging culture, which threatens to democratize published discourse among the upper-middle classes of the world. In this trend, and in Michael Moore’s uncanny rhetoric of non-objectivity, along with the Bush Administration’s flippancy toward the expert-defended Kyoto Protocol, we have begun to see a strangley ‘editorial’ cultural climate emerging on both sides of the Atlantic.
I begin to suspect that the only regime-change that has been successfully accomplished in recent years is the replacement of a supposedly knowledgeable body of ‘Experts’ in every field with an army of frankly conjectural and openly biased ‘Opinionates’ outside every field. This shift in the bio-political power dynamic can be observed in most discourses. It is not that expertise is no longer a strong cultural currency (expertise as academic specialization is still in the first stages of ascendency), but rather that the ascendency of the unforseen as such has intensified dramatically in recent years, and has given confidence to many who have been excluded from the ground of experrtise in one way or another.
It is easy to see how this may all contribute to the creation of a more open society. However, no one has exploited the tragic hubris of expertise to more distinct advantage than the most powerful opponent of open society in the world, the Bush Administration. The most difficult detail of the situation is that, while using the anti-intellectual momentum of the public mistrust of experts, the Administration at once employs the rhetoric of predictive expertise for its own purposes. The first evidence of such a dynamic is suggested by the assymetric presence of leagues of theory-based academics in an administration led by a president who, as the late Hunter S. Thompson observed, ‘talks like a donkey.’ The second clue comes in the paradox of a Yale-educated billionaire from a ‘great’ Connecticut family, who was himself born in New Haven, speaking with a rural, Texas accent. Out of such uncanniness, a picture quickley emerges of a meticulously engineered attempt to produce an image of a leader who fits a viscious stereotype of damaged masculinity and outright stupidity. In this context we might substitute the most common of Shakesperean observations, “Though this be madness, yet there is method in 't,” with “There is method in the stupidity.” Whose method, though? Bush’s? Bush Senior’s? Or his cabinet? Among those who have observed this dynamic, the most common answer is Karl Rove. This question is impossible to answer decisivley. But even if we never have our answer, even if it is ‘no one’s’ method in particular, and this is the sticking point, the method still remains a method.
How does the method work? It’s goal is to subvert the pretence to expertise shared by the upper-middle class, liberal intelligensia of North America and Western Europe, who comprise an increasingly large percentage of the population in these tiny corners of the world. Such a method begins by seeing the liberal intelligensia as a new universal class, with the power to historically outmode such instituions as the church, pure capitalism, fundamental rights, and (now) security. This point of view is not wholly different than that of many 19th Century Russian Nihlists like Pisarev and Chernyshevsky. But unlike the Russian Nihlists, the ‘enactors’ of the neoconservative method (and this is where they get tricky) perform a counter-imitative negation of the values of the liberal intelligensia which spawned them. This is to say that the modern neoconservatives reverse the values of their class while actually reinstating them in ever-purer manifestations.
This is the very essence of the concept of the counter-imitative, as introduced to sociology by French theorist Gabriel Tarde: in our opposition or resistance, we are guided by the logic of our opponents, and we are either conscious of this or not (this can be used against us, or not). Of course, the ascendency of G. W. Bush at first seems to occur as a negation of the academic socialism, liberalism, and neo-liberalism of North America and Western Europe - until we begin to pay attention to all the tiny details that don’t seem to fit in the story. (These details, I might add, have become enormous unseen chasms for would-be critics of Bush) Firstly, the administration seems, like Odysseus, to sail everywhere by paradox. This is announced in the frankly oxymronic banner of “compassionate conservatism,” since it is well known that of all conservative state governors, Bush Jr. was the very least compassionate (having conducted hundreds of questionable and useless executions). The contradictions in the cultural position of neoconservatism are present everywhere, precisley because they have been carefully nurtured everywhere.
It is not entirley the “smart people” behind Bush who are responsible for this strategy of counter-imitation, but very probably Bush himself. His case highlights the fact that speech pattern and accent are no longer determined (if they ever were) by class, ethnicity, and geography. In the present day United States, a Connecticut Yankee billionaire, whose father has the dominant North-Eastern accent, can decide that he’s a working-class Texas cowboy, adopt the accent, and rise as high as the Presidency in public visibility, without anyone pointing out that this is fraudulent. Bush Jr. was intimate, throughout most of his childhood and early adulthood, with the elites of the New England Liberal intelligensia - not as hated enemies, but as important teachers and even as friends. It is inconceivable that he could have managed to escape Yale without vast experience in the same culture and vernacular that produced the Clintons and their allies, just as he did not escape his brief stays in Texas without a (somewhat forced) working-class West Texas accent. As many have pointed out, his policies and cabinet appointments show a similar counter-imitation: appointing more ethinic minorities to his cabinet than Clinton, allowing openly gay soldiers to serve in the military, giving the go-ahead to gay civil unions, impeding nearly all first-amendment rights, and intensifying the Blair-Clinton policy of turning the Anglo-American organism into a global police entity. These were each and all, according to their conservative opponents, treasured items on the Democratic Clinton platform. In the ‘changed world’ of post-9/11 however (where the sun rises in the West and salt tastes like sugar), all political ‘binaries’ such as right and left, north and south, and so on, are open, not for chatoic displacement, but for careful replacment by those who have the power to negotiate their own identity. In the fluidity of his personal identity, Bush has created a visage of conservatism that simultaneously enacts huge swaths of the ‘liberal’ agenda. It is not at all that he is actually a conservative capitalist in opposition to the upper-middle class expert intelligensia in North America and Western Europe, but that he can suddenly enact many of thier most cherished policies without them even noticing. This appropriation of liberalism’s most rhetorically-cherished (but not most important or most radical) agendas serves to confuse the rhetoric of effective resistance.
While Blair and Clinton employed similar strategies of appropriation (of conservative agendas), they have both been dramatically less successful at disorienting the rhetorical stances of their opponants. What gave Bush this rhetorical edge is (precisley) the plausibility of his identity as a brainless, illiterate vulgarian. While subsuming elements of the Clintonian-Blairite agenda within himself, he simultaneously gathers alienated religious fundamentalists, nationalists and damaged middle-aged males of every ilk, closer to him by appearing to share their anti-intellectualism, their contempt for expertise, and their alienation from language games played by the intellectual elite. This, in turn, redirects popular ‘liberal’ critique against these same ‘conservative’ alienated cultural elements, while high-level critique of “the issues” by democratic politicians are robbed of their ‘moderate,’ timid, campaign platforms. This is the impossible rhetorical situation In which John Kerry found himself in the campaign of 2004.
To this end, Bush is completely dependant for his popularity on discourses of anti-americanism, on the domestic and international image of Bush as the King Idiot at the helm of the Ship of Fools (America). These twin tactics of rhetorical deflection and deflation seem to be Bush’s own personal and decisive contribution the success of the single most destructive and regressive administration in American history.