This excellent example of the way categories or names prescribe our way of conceiving or thinking through problem came through the nettime email list recently.
On 29/09/2007, Thijs wrote:
> “[…] In contrast to most post-modern nation states, Islamic fundamentalism offers the kind of warm hearth for which many shaken Western souls might yearn.”
Maybe it would be more accurate to say that words like “fundamentalism” and “terrorism” offer the kind of warm hearth for which many shaken Western souls might yearn: the ability to lump together a wide range of social phenomena that they don’t understand under a few convenient labels taken from American and European history, such as American Protestant fundamentalism and the French revolutionary Terror of the 1790s.
Here are some possible alternatives (which I’m sure could be improved):
Al Qaeda: Salafi nationalist guerilla network
Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood: Sunni reformist party
Hamas: Sunni Palestinian nationalist party and militia
Hizballah: Shia Lebanese nationalist party and militia
Two things leap out of this sort of classification: the need to know something about Islam in order to know what the Arabic words mean, and the need to take nationalism seriously as a force that motivates opposition movements.
Ben
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Category: for my students
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Names, categories and the limitations they impose (slightly oblique example for students in EP this year)
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The problem of Theodicy
or the existence of evil.
A very nice presentation of the theodicy problem in its classical formulation. One of the things to note (for my students who were working with me last year on Hume’s Dialogues where this formulation is also present) is the nature of the four options as exhausting the logical space of possibility. This at least is the power of the formula…of course, trying to work out whether these options are the only options is going to push you to think about the nature of choice and the setting of options in the first place…and might have some resonance for the problem from which Kierkegaard begins in his Fear and Trembling…
enjoy
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Note for Matt (no theodicy)
hiya matt, just a quick notice to say the new email address you sent me doesn’t seem to work and the old one now seems defunct…please contact me again 😉
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Revision tips…
As my students are now entering that end of year revision period we’ve been doing a lot of tutorials and revision classes. These are always interesting as often the students seem to talk more and be willing to communicate what they know at this point because the onus shifts to them nedding to do so…I can only encourage them to do this more during the year – the more you articulate your own understanding of ideas verbally and in communication with others the easier it becomes to write student essays in situations like exams as your fluency with the arguments improves.
Anyway, aside from the core of all revision (get to know the material indside out!!) there are a couple of tips I’d offer:
1) The psychological anchor – lock some phrase, formula or quote into your memory. Do this repetitively during the time you are revising and really learn it off by heart so you can recall it at any time. This anchor will then be the tip of the iceberg, easily brought to mind and when you bring it to mind it will help connect you to the revision work your consciousness has taken in and filed somewhere you’re not sure of deep in your brain. Think of it literally like an anchor – it provides a key to access the material you’ve taken in through activating a psychological connection. It also enbales you to write something down when you get into the exam rather than encounter than dread silence of the mind when faced with the blank paper – instead of worrying about what to do, write down the anchor and then begin making a list of the various points that will come to mind, after which you can assemble them into the order in which they will be approached.
2) Use keywords and phrases (ie: intentionality, the a posteriori argument from design etc) – then ask – what does this mean, what does it do, how does it work. Expklain these things when you introduce a concept and you will find things almost come naturally.
3) When writing and in the middle of a paragraph or line of argument a stray thought pops into mind, one that you know is relevant but which isn’t immediately relevant, write it down on a piece of paper to the side of the essay you’re workign on, then leave it alone and return to what you were writing. Finish off the line of thought you were on and then look at the notes you jotted down and ask yourself how do I fit this in, what do I need to do to get to it? This will stop the essays flitting about and enable you to write a coherent piece rather than meerely spewing up as much as you can as fast as you can – remember, the argument is the star, coherent essays with 6 main points are better than incoherent essays with 6 points. Fluency and coherence are more than simple stylistic features, they form the points of knowledge into an inferential pattern with power and force rather than a set of random thoughts.
That will do for now – good luck in your exams all!
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MA Deleuze workshop
(This is for my MA class…not a public event I’m afraid 😉
Hi all and I hope your essay work is going well and you’ve enjoyed the easter break.
This is to confirm the details of the Workshop we will be having this Friday.
MA Deleuze class Workshop
FRIDAY 20TH APRIL
2pm-8pm, KW202KW202 is formally called a ‘drama studio’ (so that might be appropriate) and is up the stairs to the second floor, turn right and it’s at the end of the corridor.
I’ll bring some coffee and biscuits and we’ll have a break of half an hour about 5/5.30.
The idea is for you to 20 minute presentations, followed by ten minutes or so of discussion. These things will no doubt be flexible and if you only have a short presentation do still come and do it – the space to present the ideas and talk them out / through is very useful. If you can bring at least two copies of your text then I can take a copy away give you some extra feedback over the weekend. Remember I am away from the 25th to May 1st and the deadline is the 30th April, so this will be your last chance to get direct feedback either in person or in email form.
Powered by ScribeFire.
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The phenomenological reduction (notes for students)
The natural attitude contains within it an ability to move, a ‘natural mobility’, and this mobility is going to become the basis for the ‘reduction’ that is the central methodological core of phenomenology. Husserl says: “I can shift my standpoint in space and time, look this way and that, turn temporally forwards and backwards: I can provide for myself constantly new and more or less clear and meaningful perceptions and representations, and images also more or less clear, in which I make intuitable to myself whatever can possibly exist really or supposedly in the steadfast order of space and time” (Ideas: S27 p103).
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Some links for my MA students
First of all here’s the link to Dan Smith’s paper, which I recomend you all read as it has an excellent account of deleuze’s relation to Lebiniz. Dan is coming to Greenwich in July for the Volcanic Lines conference on Kant and Deleuze.
Secondly here is the link to the animations and basic introduction to the infinitessimal calculus that I showed you in class. Again, as I said then, I do not endorse anything about the site, I simply think that the animations are useful visual tools.
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The Eternal Return of the Mack?
I’ve gone wrong somewhere with the Eternal Return idea in chapter 1 of Difference and Repetition:
The eternal return, according to Deleuze, effectively realises Being in the following way: “Being is said in a single and same sense, but this sense is that of eternal return as the return or repetition of that of which it is said.”
The test of something’s return is it’s excessivity, it’s becoming – different:
“When Nietzsche says that hubris is the real problem of every Heraclitean, or that hierarchy is the problem of free spirits, he means one – and only one – thing: that it is in hubris that everyone finds the being which makes him return…”
(Both quotations from Difference & Repetition, Continuum Press, 2004, p. 51)
Hubris is the repetition of difference, and this repetition is the expression of univocal being. The test of returning is concerned with the idea that production is only expressed in actualising new forms, where ‘hubris’ denotes forces that transgress the qualitative state of a subject such that it is destroyed (i.e. not an oppositional but a generical difference?) and a new process of individuation starts its becoming.
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Greenwich, bombs and history
I was browsing through the Guardians’ interactive blog page, ‘Comment is Free‘, earlier today and there was an interesting article on the parallels between the current anti-Muslim reactions in the West and earlier reactions to Jewish communities at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century. As part of that article there was mention of the 1894 attack on the Greenwich Observatory, just across the road from us here at Greenwich University. Some further browsing connected me with Mike Davis’ article on the car bomb and the useful reminder of a historical perspective being necessary and vital in any attempt to develop critical thought about the world around us. (Mike Davis is speaking in London later this month as part of an interesting series of talks being run by the ICA called ‘The new left: then and now’).
I’ve been arguing to my first year ‘Introduction to philosophy’ students that one of the key tasks philosophy can achieve is a degree of empowerment via critical thought. The very concept of knowledge (classically distinguished as ‘episteme’ or science as opposed to ‘doxa’ or opinion) is used to establish a certain power relation. The claims of knowledge are more powerful than those of opinion, so goes the argument. In one sense, of course, this seems incontrovertible – ‘that which we know to be true’ is always to be accepted before ‘that which might or might not be true’ but which, in any case, we do not yet ‘know to be true’. The role of truth for most of society, inevitably depends not on truth itself but on this connection of truth and knowledge. A known truth has a power. The ability to develop a critical skill, a critical thought, rests primarily on the development of an ability to question how we know what we know. This, after all, is Plato’s argument in the model of ‘the divided line’ – the knowledge that knows how it is known is superior even to the knowledge that is incontrovertibly true, such as mathematical, deductive knowledge. For Plato, such knowledge that knows itself is ‘dialectic’ or understanding (noesis) and comes above mere rational thought (dianoia).
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Phenomenology and the ‘natural attitude’
Let’s begin by looking at the ‘natural attitude’. In the ‘Ideas’ (class reader extracts), sections 27, 28, 29 and 30 contain the core outline of the ‘natural attitude’ (NA) that will concern us at the moment.
Before going any further let me give a ‘pre-philosophical’ definition: the NA is that attitude in which we normally stand, the way in which we go about our life, prior to all questioning of what we are doing or thinking. The NA is like the unquestioned life, as it were.
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razorsmile :: philosophy//magic //revolution 