Date: Thu, 11 Dec 1997 10:05:51 -0800 (PST)
Subject: Re: Reason & Metanarratives




On Wed, 10 Dec 1997, hugh bone wrote:

> MATTHEW FRANCIS WETTLAUFER wrote:
> 
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> 
> Thanks for your definition of metanarrative.  It sounds, if you'll
> excuse my indebtedness to the Enlightenment, "reasonable".

Well thankyou! :)

> 
> I expect each of the named living persons you've cited lately would
> give a slightly, sometimes significantly different definition,
> but yours is good enough for now.

I would imagine so, I should hope so.


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> REPLY:
> I don't think many people would argue that it was "the" metanarrative
> for several generations of people all over the globe since Marx
> wrote it down.
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I believe there can always be more than one metanarrative at play at a
particular time.  Capitalism and liberal democracy is a metanarrative
too.  It has a particular ascendency right now, for the time being, but
others have had their play too (humanism during the Renaissance,
Catholicism prior to the Reformation, etc).  Metanarrative literally
means "beyond narrative"--when a narrative forgets that it is just that:
a "narrative".  When it assumes itself as permanently true, universally
valid, a totalizing of experience.

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>  REPLY: I believe History became a God-substitute for Hegel, Marx, and
> their disciples; a metanarrative force that explains forever, as you
> say.  
> Genealogy, as Foucault used it, was a different take, exploring the
> genesis of different ideas about institutions and how they form social
> beings.
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I agree although an argument can be made that Hegel's working out of the
problem of the dialectic stems directly from his blending of Christianity 
and Greek thought.  As you recall the dialectic posits the possibility of 
self-knowledge, of self-consciousness, and that this movement occurs
through the passage of Geist or spirit/mind, through individuals and 
through nation states, to the point where it is realized in the
fulfillment of Absolute Spirit or Knowledge at the "end" of history.
Christianity also posits an end to history but I don't believe it posits
a progressive development to history the way Hegel and Marx do.> 

Foucault would probably say that history however doesn't arise out of an
origin and proceed along clear and logical lines towards some telos, some 
goal, but rather it proceeds out of disruptions and disjunctions that are 
inexplicable and have no causal relationship to the effects they bestow.  
Which would not be offering a reversal of Hegel or Marx, but a way of
reading historical events that is "different"--neither progressive nor
regressive.

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>  
> REPLY: Hope omission of Gulag was accidental.
> 
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I think I said earlier that some would consider Stalin not as an
aberration of Marxism but as Marxism's logical fulfillment.  

However, I think out of all those examples there is something different
about the Shoah, the Holocaust, not in terms of brutality or cruelty but
in terms of method and intent.  In some sense the Holocaust is still
"unthinkable"--it belies the attempt of language to capture it, because
when language attempts to, there is always the sense of a betrayal, a
falling short of the memory of the event.  Lyotard's Heidegger and "the
jews" is very good in discussing this problem (and the necessity
nevertheless of trying to talk about what is unthinkable).
Lacoue-Labarthe's book on Heidegger is also good, though I have serious
problems with his defense of Heidegger towards the end (when he's
responding to Farias's book).

> 
> The one thing I got from Gadamer was the thought that we can unknowingly
> make assertions which are the answer to some question.  
> 
> And have the good will toward Derrida to presume he may have written
> something which I could read and profit from; but scanning his books and
> hearing him quoted offers no encouragement. 
> 
> I presume your good will and that of others on the list.
> 
> We presume goodwill to live, and so did our parents or we never would
> have survived.

I don't think we are arguing that good will is given in all sorts of
expressions all the time.  As you mentioned, Derrida expresses the hope
that his books will be understood, he wants to be read.

But I think it's what follows from that which is problematic.  As I said
in response to Mark's post, I don't think there is a lot of difference
between Derrida and Gadamer, ultimately, except how each defines his
position in relation to the other.  They both acknowledge the
impossibility of stepping out of this system of language by which to get
a total view, they both acknowledge (in different ways) the detours and
postponements of meaning that always occur in dialogue or writing, but
they both allow for the possibility of meanings though provisional
meanings, meanings that are never The Meaning, never complete (never a
signifier that is entirely self-referential, a transcendental signifier).

I think Derrida's point is not Gadamer's method but his characterization
of that method, his presumption of concord and agreement in the act of
interpretation.  Whether one agrees with that criticism or not of course
is another matter.
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> 
> You get some of that in Feyerabend.

I would imagine--I've not read him yet.

> 
> Also I keep writing about languages other than words, and so did
> Lyotard.  

Please keep in mind that when Derrida is talking about language he
doesn't have in mind "written" or "spoken" language.  The ideas or
non-concepts of the "trace" and "arche-writing" are efforts to
convey this sense of an economy of indentations, of absences that
are not the effects of prior presences, but which are that which permit us
to have languages, including speech, writing, and so forth.

Science is
knowledge and knowledge is power, and science
has
> remade "reality", as we know it, just as political and financial power
> have in only a couple of centuries, turned people into product, to be
> exploited like any other domestic animal.
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Yes, I would agree with you about that.

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> REPLY:
> The self is what one experiences when awake and capable of remembering
> thinking, imagining etc.

I would suggest that what you are describing could be seen in terms of
Freud's "Wunderblock", the wax writing apparatus or children's toy, where
indentations can be made upon the plastic and "recorded" as traces in the
wax, and then vanish from the plastic when the latter is lifted.  Derrida
has an essay on this model of the psyche.  It was an effort to explain how
we could receive impressions, forget them, and yet still have them stored
somewhere (the unconscious) from which they could re-present themselves to
our consciousness during dreams or other unusual states of mind.  Derrida
saw this as an attempt to explain how we can have both the absence and the
presence of something at the same time.  Our memories are the effects of a
"trace" of something that is no longer there.  But of course this is just
a model for talking about something--a fictional presentation, a metaphor. 
Freud didn't really think we had wax toys embedded in our brains! 

> > Post-structuralists can reject language but
they can't make
it go > away, they can reject their own "selves" but it will make little
> difference in their actions.

I don't know where you got it that I said post-structuralists reject
language.  On the contrary, post-structuralists would accord the greatest 
importance to language.  They would say that the construction of a "self" 
is done through language, that it is a metaphor, a figurative gesture.

>  
> There are 259 definitions of "self" in the on-line Merriam-Webster, so
> others asked your question and got 259 answers. You're the only one who
> can answer it for your "self". 

Appealing to the dictionary sort of reaffirms my point!  And who wrote
that dictionary?  What were his (or her) credentials for giving us 259
definitions?  Why not 260 instead? :)

I agree, appeals to an original source for confirmation of one's views
will always be an arbitrary act.  Derrida says wherever we begin is
arbitrary, unjustifiable, so we might as well begin somewhere--since
there is no final origin and no final goal, no place where language
"ends", where meaning finally and totally "arrives" in the structuralist
sense of deferral or postponement.

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> > Cashinahua Notice is page 152 of "Le Differend", Univ. of Minn. Press
> Declaration of 1789 is page 145.
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Thankyou for the reference.

Matt