i think i picked up the idea of "conversation" from a b3n w4tson backlash argt against de saussure!

[dubdobdee]

geuss on rorty on "conversation" (and some discontents)

have only skimmed this: am totally back-achey and mentally fuzzy today and not getting my ideas in order on ANYTHING, least of all chumpdom left right or elsewhere

am tryin to do a (small) bit of spring cleaning -- or at least its pintsize cousin "putting stuff away"

Comments

[koganbot]

I gave this a cursory reading: probably deserves a more attentive one, but it's more of "notes towards a character sketch of a character I liked but didn't believe I ever understood" than something that grapples with the arguments that Rorty was grappling with. Or the grappling seems vague (which it sometimes does with Rorty, as well). What Rorty means by "conversation" could just as easily be expressed by the word "dance" - he means human interplay, and he was opposing this to a tendency within philosophy to try to plant itself in principles that were eternal and nonhuman, outside the brawl, as it were, outside the human dance, outside the contingency of actual human purposes and enterprises. I don't see where Geuss is challenging this, actually, so his discontent with Rorty's metaphor doesn't seem to have much point, really.

[byebyepride.livejournal.com]

I think the implication is that Rorty was a poor conversationalist, when he lost interest in, or felt he wasn't being received warmly by, the other party. But the argument isn't ad hominem, since I think it's fairly clear from Geuss's hints at what his own position is, but this is coded via the references to different philosophers. I don't think you could substitute 'dance' for 'conversation' since isn't it the human capacity for language that distinguishes conversation as a practice which might make possible progress, from other rituals by which social groups are constituted, and wouldn't serve to distinguish human behaviour from similarly interactive animal behaviours.

[byebyepride.livejournal.com]

Foucault might be more happy about the substitution of 'dance' for 'conversation' but if you point me to the relevant bit of Rorty (since I've only really dipped into the essays and never got far with The Mirror of Nature book) I'll happily retract!

[koganbot]

We're xposting like crazy, but I don't think Rorty particularly cared about the question "what makes us human" or in distinguishing us from other creatures, except to the extent that he thought we shouldn't think we're different in kind from other creatures. Which is to say that where Rorty makes the point that "language goes all the way down" or some such, so quarks and galaxies only exist for us in relation to the discourses we have about them, he's not doing that to distinguish us from the beasts (for whom dirt and air only exist for them in relation to how they use dirt and air, and not having language they have no access to notions of galaxies and quarks, but they're as reactive as we are) but to distinguish one sort of philosophy (that which tries to plant itself firmly in something extra-human) from another (the adaptive, pragmatic).

And what Rorty's not doing (and I'm not saying that you or Geuss says he is, I'm just making an extra point) is saying "because language is like such and such, therefore we are like such and such." For Rorty, that sort of philosophy is just metaphysics in linguistic guise.

[byebyepride.livejournal.com]

I don't think that's Rorty's question, my point was that it's the presupposition of the claim that that the conversation of mankind is worth pursuing [see 'moral concern' in the passage I cite further down, and this is what Geuss is pointing at when he says 'If to be human ... is to take a part in a, or this, conversation, then it seems but a short step from that to the claim that philosophy is important because it is a way in which the conversation maintains itself']. But perhaps your naturalist Rorty would be happy to see 'conversation' and 'dance' as interchangeable, i.e. unwilling to say that philosophy is important. I'm sure that from Rorty's point of view, Geuss is unhappily attached to old-style metaphysics. But I suspect that Geuss wishes to defend philosophy as more than just a 'style' of talking.

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

can't remember if this is a discussion we've had or my in-head sketch of one i felt we should have, but i've wondered in the past if "philosophy" as a topic -- discipline/department -- isn't what you might call a "necessary evil" to get universities as institutions set up and set (somewhat) apart from the rest of human interplay: ie that the "outside the brawl" ideal HAS to be institutionalised (for all its faults) so as to shoulder away the more destructive riptides of all possible brawls, from places where discussion and the exploration of knowledge can flourish if not uninterrupted then at least spottily

(this seems a bit of a kantian idea possibly)

[byebyepride.livejournal.com]

Yeah, this sounds like the modern 'German' idea of a university - the older idea is far more pragmatic as far as I know i.e. it's where people go to learn useful stuff, since rhetoric, dialectic, etc. all have quite well-articulated ideas of their purposes. But this (i.e. the German idea) is philosophy conceived as the science of sciences, i.e. a ground which is precisely not religious, political, social etc, but self-certifying and validating. It's obviously unstable, since it can't compete with the results produced by enquiry on the natural science model, which leads to the shrinking realm occupied by philosophy as a discipline. I guess Hegel sees philosophy as the Brawl of all Brawls, i.e. looks a bit like Rorty since he sees everything as conversation, but a lot unlike Rorty in that he sees the conversation as the absolute, i.e. truth in a way Rorty seems to deny. But my feeling is that yr Oakeshotts, Gadamers etc are 'soft' Hegelians in that they want the shape of total knowledge, but without the distinctively philosophical claim (i.e. that what they know is true).

[byebyepride.livejournal.com]

Although maybe Rorty thinks mankind is a species which just happens to have a conversation? In which case there are no particular grounds on which one might choose whether or not to continue that conversation, or rather there are plenty of grounds (for fun, to achieve some specific end), but no 'deep' ones. e.g. it is not the destiny of the species to have such and such a conversation, and it will continue as long as it continues, and take the course it takes.

[koganbot]

(Oops, my first attempt to write this was unintelligible)

Oh, I missed this post, which says well what I then went on to say later. Rorty puzzles me because I just can't grasp what he thinks a role for pragmatism can be beyond pointing out that one doesn't need a foundationalist philosophy. But he does seem to think pragmatism has a potentially useful role, such as in rooting out the effects of "Platonism" in everyday life (I've put "Platonism" in scare quotes because Rorty doesn't necessarily hold Plato responsible for all of it), while I don't see that this "Platonism" really is in everyday life. (But "Platonism" has had such many and varied uses that I'm completely out of my depth in talking about it.)

[koganbot]

Well, I may be projecting my own wishes on Rorty here, but my guess is that he'd say something like "There are plenty of reasons to keep 'the conversation of mankind going,' but these are no different in kind for reasons to keep any conversation going (the conversation of mankind just being the aggregate conversations (pl.) of mankind), which is to say we have this reason or that reason to talk about stuff (like, 'What should we make for dinner?') but we hardly need to give an overall reason for saying why we don't think conversations should stop altogether, conversations not being generated or ended by such broad reasons." I don't know. Would he say that? I feel confused here, but that is because I never got a handle on what Geuss's critique of any of Rorty's ideas actually was. Anyway, I hope you don't think that I'm badgering you with these responses. When I badger you I'll try to do it on the basis of what you believe, not of what Geuss might believe.

[byebyepride.livejournal.com]

'conversation' is an interesting idea/l because it's so slippery - certainly idealist in the sense that Marx denounced in the Young Hegelians, I think, but beyond that sliding from an almost utopian sense of progressive human history (even if only as increasing refinement of discussion) to a kind of nihilist denunciation of certain forms of social thinking as unable to see that they are 'only' talk. Certainly it seems to have this kind of ambiguity in Rorty - Geuss brings this out well, I feel. Interesting to see he gets the term from Gadamer rather than Oakeshott who is the key English-speaking source on this side of the Atlantic. But I'd argue that the logic of history as conversation is hardwired into the 'modern' conception of philosophy as analysis of language about the world, and history as the creation of the world in language, so its frequency in discussion is unsurprising. Of course the hint towards 'polite' conversation, or conversation governed by 'manners', might point us towards Burke / Austen, and tradition reconfigured as the virtues of the propertied, educated and leisured (but not too much) classes. I also jumped when I realised that I must have made the same misreading of Geuss's book as Rorty, but I read it when I was much more dogmatic, and tended to dismiss things half-read.

[koganbot]

Actually, Rorty cites Oakeshott in Philosophy And The Mirror Of Nature:

In this conception, "philosophy" is not a name for a discipline which confronts permanent issues, and unfortunately keeps misstating them, or attacking them with clumsy dialectical instruments. Rather, it is a cultural genre, a "voice in the conversation of mankind" (to use Michael Oakeshott's phrase), which centers on one topic rather than another at some given time not by dialectical necessity but as a result of various things happening elsewhere in the conversation (the New Science, the French Revolution, the modern novel) or of individual men of genius who think of something new (Hegel, Marx, Frege, Freud, Wittgenstein, Heidegger) or perhaps of the resultant of several such forces.

I don't see where Geuss in his essay is saying anything to counter or explore this notion. His saying that primate politics and flying planes into buildings is wordless is really trivial. Rorty actually seems close to Darwin here; species don't evolve in relation to timeless issues but in relation to how they're impinged on by other species and events and by the way individuals within the species impinge on each other. So Geuss is making to much of the connotation of "words" in Rorty's use of the metaphor "conversation." What Rorty means is social interplay, which surely apes and terrorists are engaging in, and beyond "social interplay," simply events, whatever their source. Hurricane Katrina certainly had an impact on the U.S. political conversation, even if Katrina wasn't specifically saying anything.

[koganbot]

to much = too much

[byebyepride.livejournal.com]

"The only point on which I would insist is that philosophers' moral concern should be with continuing the conversation of the West, rather than with insisting upon a place for the traditional problems of modern philosophy within that conversation". [394]

[byebyepride.livejournal.com]

or another way of looking at it: what makes a conversation a conversation (e.g. as distinct from babble) is that it carries a self-awareness of its continuity through time. Certainly this is essential to Oakeshott: the conversation of mankind is kind of a tautological expression since conversation and mankind become equivalent - man is only man to the extent that he participates in the conversation, i.e. can be aware of himself as belonging to a species with a history, as opposed to a species.

[koganbot]

Rorty would not have liked "man is only man to the extent" type sentences. (Such sentences sure seem essentialist to me, and he was adamantly antiessentialist.) He very much did not want to be saying "because man - or language - is like this, then philosophy should be like this." And I'm not saying that you or Geuss would disagree; I'm just not figuring out how Geuss would fill in the blank that goes "Because Rorty overemphasized words at the expense of music and ape politics and terrorists ramming planes into buildings, he __________." I don't see where Rorty's ideas overlook or fail to take into account what music and ape politics and wordless acts of terrorism have to teach us. And maybe this is because I use the terms "conversation" and "social dance" as virtually synonyms in my own prose, but as far as the particular point that Rorty is making, which is that philosophy responds to events rather than exploring timeless issues, and needs to stop pretending otherwise, I don't see what the difference is in which metaphor I use, or Rorty uses.

[byebyepride.livejournal.com]

Well my argument is that Oakeshott is explicitly a kind of idealist, at least in valuing the conversation of man as more than a happy accident, or at least as a happy accident worth defending, and that Rorty had better be careful about how he takes on the idea of 'a conversation of mankind' since it seems hard to use that image without bringing in presumptions about what 'mankind' is.

But I'm at the limit of my familiarity with Rorty here, and it's a long time since I read Geuss!

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

yes i think conversation is only an interesting or potent idea as long as you're not restricting it, and are attentively to eg such conflicts as "schoolroom conversation" vs "hallway conversation"

i think of pop (as in all-of-pop) as a conversation, and the charts as a smaller public-spcae conversatiuon within the bigger all-ofpop conversation, and both these -- indeed all the conversations delineated by music rather than words -- as somewhat and somehow counter to gadamer-esque conversation or habermas-esque civic-space interaction (the stooges, or mariah carey, as a challenge, or series of challenges, to the Student Debating Society: what do they bring to the discussion, that you, oh student debaters, must needs be silent darüber)

[byebyepride.livejournal.com]

the point about Rorty having no time for music and thus overrating words is interesting as I was wondering for a while whether the difference between Heidegger and Adorno boils down to poetry vs music.

[koganbot]

Well, one of my own critiques of Rorty (see the "Acknowledgements" in Real Punks) is that temperamentally he was inclined towards dealing with "civil" conversation. But that doesn't mean he wouldn't have considered planes crashing into towers and Bosnian Serbs massacring Bosnian Muslims and kids beating him up in high school as part of the conversation of mankind - if he sees the conversation of mankind as including the French Revolution, it's hard to see him excluding these others, esp. given that he himself talks about the Bosnian massacres and the high-school bullies. And I just don't see that Rorty does overrate words or what point Geuss was making in saying that Rorty did. Again, the word "conversation," which Rorty explicitly uses as a synonym for social practice ("In order to defend Sellars and Quine, I shall be arguing that their holism is a product of their commitment to the thesis that justification is not a matter of a special relation between ideas (or words) and objects, but of conversation, of social practice") isn't meant as a limit, but as taking in what foundationalist philosophy is ill-advisedly claiming to get beyond and underwrite rather than participate in. And yes, where there are justifications and reasons there are words in play, but I don't see where planes attacking towers are excluded. Unless one thinks of 9/11 as a random event, I don't see how it's somehow beyond the social world of justifications and reasons. And as someone who loves music and spends too much time listening to it, I don't see how Rorty's paying more attention to music could have made his argument any different.

Here's a passage from Rorty's "De Man and the American Cultural Left" (in Essays On Heidegger And Others):

One can generalize Quine's and Wittgenstein's points by saying that the significance of a sentence, like that of a belief or a desire, is its place in a web of other sentences, or beliefs or desires. To say this is to emphasize the context-sensitivity of signs and of thoughts - to treat them not as quasi-things but as nodes in a web of relations. But that is simply to describe them as antiessentialists wish everything - tables, quarks, people, social institutions - to be described.

Now, in making descriptions, words would be crucial, I'd think, given that you don't have descriptions without words (or, anyway, to call such things as bee displays and meerkat warning barks "descriptions" would seem to stretch the use of the word "description" for no good purpose), but Rorty is saying that there's nothing about words that make them especially more contextual and relational than anything else. So when he's using the word "conversation" he's not using it because he thinks that our use of words is somehow more social and contextual than our use of quarks or tables or melodies or dance moves or bombs, and I don't see where he'd exclude our use of any of those things from "the conversation of mankind." So, again, I'm not sure how a stronger interest in music would have inspired him to make his points any better, or to make different points.

I think when he starts making social commentary he underplays the normality of social conflict in our linguistic practices (that's why he doesn't write about Superwords and I do), but if he'd substituted the phrase "the brawl of mankind" for "the conversation of mankind" (philosophy is just another fist in the brawl of mankind) his point and his critique of foundationalist philosophy wouldn't have been any different.

"vector to the totality"

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

vector = "provides an interactive map for"
the totality = "all possible human interplay"

does that work? (i forget the rest of the sentence, except that it possibly featured r.meltzer)

Re: "vector to the totality"

[koganbot]

Well, I thought that by "vector" you meant something like tangent or pathway - something that takes you out of the circle that you've been restricting yourself to.

But "totality" is where you seemed to be floating off into a buzzword haze. First of all, why is "all possible human interplay" a "totality"? Seems as if "human interplay" would be open-ended. (And why assume that humans only interact with other humans?) But "the totality of all possible human interplay" hardly seems a relevant or necessary concept in regard with what we want from our vector. All that's necessary is that we ride our vector to some other interplay that seems interesting or compelling, not that we care whether or not we're in sight of all possible interplay. And if there is no other interplay in sight that seems interesting and compelling... oh, I don't know. I never knew what was on your mind. You either have good reason to ride the vector, or you don't, but if you have the good reason you don't need to cite some principle that takes you to a totality or something.

(To observers this last paragraph must seem unintelligible, but Mark was referring to a convo he and I were having back in 2000. No to go find that quote.)

Re: "vector to the totality"

[koganbot]

Now to go find that quote, I meant. Unless I don't find it, in which case the quote will be no-go.

Re: "vector to the totality"

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

well i think my argument was that this was where meltzer -- in 65 or so -- was arguing to himself that an aesthetics of rock could take us: so vector means "pathway towards the map", and i guess i based that on his list from uastin of all the other words that had to be taken into account (all possible human responses) before an aesthetics coudl be said to be operative

i don't see how "towards the totality" is any more or less vague than "all possible" -- one reads more open-ended than the other, maybe, if you insist that totality contains the meaning "they will one day be numbered" (whereas to me it mainly contains the idea that Western Academic Knowledge -- in whose dynamic meltzer then placed himself -- is pushes itself towards the understanding of everything it can know: that's why they're called UNIVERSITIES (<-- not sure if this is true now i written it)

i think that my point was that AT THAT TIME meltzer still saw the generalised endpoint of the understanding of everything -- the institutionalised purpose of unversitiues -- as something he shared, and THAT'SD why he was excited by "the aesthetics of rock" and wanted to pursue it in that form and that language

and that his fall away from bothering to "think through" his best ideas does actually related to a loss of faith in that idealised overall journey -- that the pragmatic rock-critic life-habit of dealing with each new item as it falls before you cuts against the desire or need to "think things through"

(i mean you may have this desire or need temperamentally -- as i think YOU do, for example -- but the University Ideal maybe possibly disciplines into some very creative or perceptive thinkers, such as meltzer, who DON;T have it temperamentally; and have, indeed, by temperament, ended up in roles and social spaces which militate against it rather)

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

vector is the pathway and the journey and i guess is rock-as-map would be pathay and journey and "endpoint" except there couldn't be an 'endpoint' cz you'd never get there -- but you have (in my supposition) to have this mystified or mystical asymptotic "direction" and "pull in a direction" to get started and keep going

fuzziness of head today more than apparent from the many absurd typos

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

try again:
vector is the pathway and the journey and i guess rock-as-map would be pathway and journey and "endpoint"...

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

anyway the reason to use "vector" is the sense that there's actually a DRIVE in a particular direction: and this is the one thing that i can't get a fix on in pragmatism, how to institute the non-immediate drives: or to put in in terms of a recurring kogan-esque concern, how to stop dubdobdee being distrcated from every shiny new topic that passes by and to focus on finshing an OLDER thought

universities are of course full of devices to focus the swivelheaded student on longer goals, but they are often (always?) devices that inculcate a disdain towards the immediate as event-to-respond-to

[koganbot]

Well, can't there be something between "I need to get this paper in by 8:30 tomorrow morning" and "I need to describe the totality of everything"? That is, immediate goals and not-so-immediate goals? In any event, when I complain about, e.g., Meltzer not following through on his ideas, it's not that I have in mind a particular endpoint or a definition of when a conversation is done, but more along the lines of "When Meltzer said that '"Like A Rolling Stone" represents an attempt to free man by rescuing him from meaning, rather than free man through meaning,' he didn't take the next step in trying to work out what he or Dylan was trying to break free of or what of what one achieves in being so freed." This doesn't mean Meltzer has to leap to the finish line or even envision a finish line, but something more than the abstract problem of "meaning" was on his mind. There's no reason that he can't be at least a bit specific, like, OK, what specifically do I wish I were free from, now how does Dylan's wordplay open things up for me? That question would be impetus for me, why not for Meltzer?