Below is a reflection on discussion that formed part of a correspondence I had a while back with someone from ‘our milieu’. This correspondence frequently became fraught and we both wondered why this was. This was my effort at understanding. The text of the email goes on to explore some of the issues we discussed. I just rediscovered this email and thought it might be of interest to others.
An aporia is: an irresolvable internal contradiction or logical disjunction in a text, argument, or theory. Or an expression of doubt.
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Discussion is an odd thing. What is it for? As long as a discussion doesn’t morph into an argument is it a way for participants to enhance their understanding of things? And, as part of that process, is it the case that the participants must explain their own positions to the degree that the other person(/s) understands where they are ‘coming from’? This might explain the mechanics of discussion, even arguments, but it doesn’t tell us what they are for. Why do we engage in discussion or have arguments? Is it for vanity – to tell others who we are? Is it for reasons of driven-ness that are largely out of our intellectual control? That is, an impulse to control others or to educate them? If we accept, even a little, that this might have something in it then would we indicate that such pedagogical motives are universal human traits, or are we safer to say that this is might be the case for the current day, but for other eras… who knows? Or do we engage in discussion to learn from others? Maybe we engage in discussion to enlist or recruit others, by less bombastic methods than those that strategise an argumentative tack. Sometimes discussion will actually be negotiation, if it is directed towards a particular type of purpose.
It is surely the case, since such a conclusion is only reasonable, that one engages in discussion for all of these reasons, and more. And that at different moments different features are dominant or missing in our motives for discussion. It would also be the case that one is often unaware of the motives of one’s engagement in discussion, since it might be a habit that one does not reflect upon.
But there is perhaps another motive for discussion that I have not mentioned, and this is to arrive at a solution, a way to take things forward, because, of course, there is no point in a discussion that has no practical outcome. If there was no aim for the achievement of a practical outcome, even if later it proves inadequate, or it is immediately felt to be doubtful, then the discussion would amount to no more than the telling of humorous stories between the participants.
Why are we engaging in this discussion? When we could just be telling each other funny stories from our respective lives? What losers we are.
Ah, but hang on, the reason we are in discussion is because - amongst other imperatives that I am perhaps aware of, and still other imperatives that I am probably not aware of - we view ourselves as slaves caught in a system that denies us our potential, or at least more joy – and because we think, or once thought, that we could make a contribution to the world that changed the world in our, and everyones', favour.
You use the term ‘aporia’ quite a lot, and it is perhaps crucial to our slightly different perspectives. You, I think, engage primarily in discussion to highlight then weed out and work beyond the aporias you discover (in others as well as in yourself), whereas I would claim to see the use of discussion as simply the discovering of aporias, for no other reason than to show impossibility. But here too is an aporia, because if I can convince others that discussion of whether or how the world might be changed ends always in a dead end, then I have enlisted them to my viewpoint, and I can smile smugly…
So, where you say you want to engage in discussion to tease out the aporias on both sides of the discussion, this does not ask for anything more than what is needed for a good, intelligent discussion: one that is dynamic and furthers the thinking of both participants. And there is nothing wrong with this. This is a reason I am engaging in this discussion. The only difference between us, if I am right, and I do not know how big or small this difference is in reality, is that your aim is to get somewhere that is in the area of ‘moving things on’, and my aim is to acknowledge a general impossibility. But here too, is another aporia in my thinking, because the notion of arriving at a dead end might implicitly demand that there are or were other routes, or that there is something beyond the dead end, or something before it. What do we do when we reach a wall? What I mean to indicate here is that discussion itself is aporetic on every level, and that everything we say or do is full of aporia and… that is the way of things. To attempt to weed out aporias from our field of vision or, perhaps, rather to identify them in order to control them, is, in my opinion, to make a mistake.
I have a saying that I think I have got from an old British TV comedy show (Dad’s Army): “There’s always one, isn’t there?” When one tries to make a sweeping statement, or tries to define a rule, there will always be ‘one person’ in the crowd or group who will prove the rule wrong. Like soldiers put into the ‘awkward squad’. It is the same as the moment in the film Life of Brian where Brian looks out of his bedroom window and sees a mass of adoring disciples. He is annoyed by them so tries to persuade them that they are all individuals who should follow their own paths with intelligence, rather displaying such a herd mentality. But they just chant back at him: “We are all individuals!” Then a lone voice deep in the crowd pipes up: “I’m not!”
So, why do I end up at impossibleness? Because of The Life of Brian, clearly. But also because I genuinely have no suggestions in general terms for what people should do; partly because I think that all previous solutions have failed in their promise; and partly because I do not know how much of the ‘false consciousness’ or misery that has ensued from the pursuit of solutions is due to unavoidable flows of material events, or to leaders who have led people on. Partly, also, because I feel that I am aware that I say one thing but do another all the time. I am against capitalism but I have spent my whole life working for it in various ways. How long might it be before what I might write (if it were ‘successful’ hahaha) becomes a way of refining capitalism (everything is appropriated and used; some say Debord was conscious of this in regard to his own work), or at least making everyone feel better about going on, in the style of Camus, or de Beauvoir, or even perhaps, or perhaps not, Vladimir and Estragon from Waiting for Godot? (Aporia alert:) I don’t want to tell people what to think, or hand out hope, I endeavour just to reveal the limits. Every time someone suggests/insists that, for example, we must build on the local and globalise it, or that we must not lose hope… then thinking is closed down by the appeal to realism. Many of us lie awake at night worrying that if we don’t tell people the truth and what to do, then nothing will happen, as if the rest of the people on the planet are stupid, or that they don’t have valid motivations, and ways of coping. But this evangelism of realism is just another work of imagination, take, for example, David Orr’s recent book, Dangerous Years. Such books as these are, in my opinion, closer to the realism of far-left, ultra-left and anarcho folk (ie the milieu we both inhabit to a degree) than such folk would care to admit. But, as Einstein apparently affirms, imagination is a powerful thing and can change the world. But if this change is facilitated on the level of ideas then it can only happen within the parameters of the current society. Thus we have Leninism fast-tracking capitalism, rather than creating a new society. The transition from Feudalism to Capitalism in Europe was not generated by a battle of ideas, even though it may have looked like that in its later manifestations. It was generated by the selfish interest of entrepreneurs who discovered the practical difference between making wealth through the extraction of absolute surplus value and through organising the potential to extract relative surplus value from the labors of their workers. It was only after this that the ideology of the Protestant Work Ethic emerged, along with the emergence of democracy and radical democracy (communism), which coincided with the decline of feudal motifs.
Capitalism must be the first society (if I can say that) that openly recognises that it is shit. It also deems other and past societies to be shit too, but an even worse kind of shit: backward and immobile. Capitalism, to personify it as Marx used to do, recognises and acknowledges that it needs constant fixing and improvement, transcendence even. Be the change you want to see in the world. Our society is built on the origin-myth of change [1] . We have to keep changing and improving (change and improvement in our society, of course, is not that at all, it is only the endless creation of busy-work and the spinning of wheels in ruts, longer lives and more dementia, but that is another story). Education not only supposedly rids us of the poor, the dirty, and the stupid (a la Pinker and E O Wilson), it also supposedly generates the bright sparks who might lead us out of the mess. Just to make myself clear (I hope), schooling, in my opinion, is the practical foundation, or later-built bulwark, of our education myth, which is central to the functioning of a society based on complex networks of dependence and control – so my point does not imply that schooling is separate to education, quite the contrary. On a side note then, I would suspect that if Marx and Hegel worked on the assumption that ‘real learning’ was experientially derived (as you indicate) then they did not actually give this learning its ‘freedom’ – they situated it teleologically, since they insisted that certain factors would lead to a certain type of education. That is, for example, for Marx, industrialisation was necessary (though painful) and industrial struggle was meant to lead to a socialist consciousness not to neo-liberalism. They still believed in education (or learning) as a social motor, that must be implemented either by educators or social and economic forces, rather than learning as an individual pursuit. In terms of a schooling system, I guess, from what you have said, they would prefer a John Dewey approach. Probably, in fact, a Sudbury School approach. I would certainly have preferred to send my own children to a Sudbury-type school, but I would not be under any illusion that, despite all its appeals to experiential learning, it still produces an education because of the fact that it is situated within a society that systematically/foundationally controls, in a complex web of vectors, and therefore educates (education has nothing to do with promoting intelligence, but only with manners, behaviours, and training).
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You ask what I mean by Hegel and movement, and Foucault. What I mean is to juxtapose the notion of a narrative of human development (movement) as the species grows older with the notion of a mode of production. It is Foucault, I think, who explores the essence of the idea of modes of production through his reframing of ‘history’ as genealogy.
I now worry about using any thinkers in correspondence with you, as you seem to want to put me in a philosophical box – perhaps Foucauldian, for example – and I am unsure that is entirely fair, but it might be fair of course. I agree with you about Jacques Bidet for example, but I didn’t write a brief opinion on Bidet in the last piece because my point was only to point out that his interpretation provided a different perspective on Foucault. I wasn’t saying he was right, just seeing if that meant anything to you.
When I used the word pessimistic, in scare quotes, in reference to Foucault I was only referencing a general view that his thinking does not provide a solution, so people view it as ‘pessimistic’.
The aporia you identify in Foucault: that he sees truth as contingent, is exactly the beauty of his thinking for me. Not in the sense of a modern multi-culturalist relativism, but in the sense of different eras, or modes of production – or, better, different ways of living. It is foolish to base a philosophy on the notion that each individual has their own equally valid version of truth, but it is interesting to examine the limits to understanding that become apparent to the sensitive anthropologist when studying radically different cultures, or the historian who studies previous societies. However, this is rarely done, except by such as Marilyn Strathern, Roy Wagner, and Foucault himself. The usual approach of the historian or anthropologist is to believe, in Sherlock Holmes fashion, that with the correctly ground magnifying glass any society and its motivations can be understood. Marxists, for example, might think that any society can be understood by reference to its economic basis, or mode of production – and this is pretty good, but it fails, as Sahlins, Clastres and Baudrillard point out, correctly in my view (though I am not a Sahlinist, Clastreanist, or Baudrillardist), when one considers a society that does not operate to produce.
Others will just project back in time supposed universal (trans-historical) human traits (usually economistic and survivalist) that are evident in the present day, to the past in order to identify motivations and therefore explain the events of the past. Fernand Braudel was the master here, and Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie gave this misguided self-assuredness poetic beauty in his study of the Medieval Cathars of Montaillou. But the tradition continues with recent historians such as Yuval Noah Harari who write such nonsense as:
On a hike in East Africa 2 million years ago, you might well have encountered a familiar cast of human characters: anxious mothers cuddling their babies and clutches of carefree children playing in the mud; temperamental youths chafing against the dictates of society and weary elders who just wanted to be left in peace; chest-thumping machos trying to impress the local beauty and wise old matriarchs who had already seen it all. [Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind]
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[1] See how ‘pre-history’ myths/stories from around the world are changed to provide lessons we can understand today. For example, there is a lovely film, ‘Atanarjuat’ from Canada, that tells the story of revenge and feud, but whereas in the original versions there is no ending and the feuding continues (there is not even a beginning, the origin of the feud is not given) in the film version there is a degree of forgiveness that establishes peace. The Indigenous writers of this version stated that they changed this to fit with modern, colonialist tropes – that is, if they hadn’t then the story would have said very little to a modern audience (Indigenous included): it would not have given us a lesson, a solution, a future image of peace and happiness… (as in, they all lived happily ever after…)
What was your correspondence about? The problem is often the lack of a subject/question.