Hist and Theory

8/12/2019 Hist and Theory

1/26

History and Theory 43 (February 2004), 57-82 Wesleyan University 2004 ISSN: 0018-2656

THE RETURN OF THE SUBJECT AS AHISTORICO-INTELLECTUAL PROBLEM1

ELAS PALTI

ABSTRACT

Recently, a call for the return of the subject has gained increasing influence. The powerof this call is intimately linked to the assumption that there is a necessary connectionbetween the subject and politics (and ultimately, history). Without a subject, it isalleged, there can be no agency, and therefore no emancipatory projectsand, thus, nohistory. This paper discusses the precise epistemological foundations for this claim. Itshows that the idea of a necessary link between the subject and agency, and thereforebetween the subject and politics (and history) is only one among many different ones thatappeared in the course of the four centuries that modernity spans. It has precise historico-intellectual premises, ones that cannot be traced back in time before the end of the nine-teenth century. Failing to observe the historicity of the notion of the subject, and project-ing it as a kind of universal category, results, as we shall see, in serious incongruence and

anachronisms. The essay outlines a definite view of intellectual history aimed at recover-ing the radically contingent nature of conceptual formations, which, it alleges, is the still-valid core of Foucaults archeological project. Regardless of the inconsistencies in hisown archeological endeavors, his archeological approach intended to establish in intel-lectual history a principle of temporal irreversibility immanent in it. Following his lead,the essay attempts to discern the different meanings the category of the subject has his-torically acquired, referring them back to the broader epistemic reconfigurations that haveoccurred in Western thought. This reveals a richness of meanings in this category that areobliterated under the general label of the modern subject; at the same time, it illumi-nates some of the methodological problems that mar current debates on the topic.

I. INTRODUCTION

The emergence of postmodernity is commonly identified by both its supportersand its detractors as the period in which the (modern) idea of the subject dis-solved. Such a dissolution allegedly has both theoretical and practical implica-tions. Without a subject, it is claimed, no history or ethics is conceivable: sub-ject, history, and politics are supposedly tied in a non-contingent fashion. AsElizabeth Ermarth recently put it:

Along with the modern individual subject, what vanishes into the discursive condition isthe entire apparatus of infinities, objectifiers, and common denominators upon which somuch has depended, including representational politics. The consensus apparatuses ofrepresentational art, of democratic systems, and even history are in doubt. . . . Funeral

1. This article is a part of a larger work,A Brief History of the Modern Subject. I thank two editorsof this journal, Ethan Kleinberg and Brian Fay, for very helpful comments on a previous version of it.


2/26


3/26


4/26

cisely from the crisis of the concept of Subject Foucault spoke about. A his-torical review of the diverse concepts of subject and its relationship toagency that emerged in the last two centuries would allow us to uncover therichness and diversity of the meanings of the categories at stake here.

Indeed, in the following pages, I will describe two conceptual ruptures (andlimn the outlines of a third, currently in progress), only one of which Foucaultanalyzed. These ruptures separate different epistemic fields, within which thevery interrogation regarding the question of agency and subjectivity in historyhas been formulated. The identification of these epistemological thresholds willhelp to avoid many confusions, inconsistencies, and anachronisms besmirchingcurrent debates regarding the notions of subject and agency in history (a goal thatwas, ultimately, the object behind Foucaults archeological enterprise, at least asI understand it).

The basic point of all of this is quite simple. Current calls for the return of thesubject presuppose the assumption that agency requires a subject. Hence, withno subject, there would be no history (or politics), and, conversely, providedthere are things that change over time and that purposeful actions exist, the sub-ject should be behind those changes and actions. However, notions of bothagency and subject have changed significantly over the past four hundred years.The idea of a necessary link between these two categories makes sense onlywithin the framework of a particular historical episteme, that is, it entails a defi-nite concept of temporality, a given view of nature and history, and so on, whoseorigins and crisis can be precisely determined. As we shall see, the above-men-tioned presupposition that associates agency with subject rests on a number ofconceptual premises that have currently become untenable. In fact, not eventhose who nowadays call for the return of the subject can endorse them, inas-much as the epistemological conditions for these conceptual premises have his-torically disappeared. Such a call is credible only under the condition of system-atically overlooking the set of presuppositions and conceptual implicationsintrinsic to that call. Ultimately, such a call bespeaks an ahistorical reading ofintellectual history.

II. FROM THE AGE OF REPRESENTATION TO THE AGE OF HISTORY

As we have seen, an increasing number of authors today affirm as necessary thereturn of the subject. However, when they try to specify just exactly what thissubject is that should return, agreement immediately proves to be illusory.

Fitzhugh and Leckie, for example, conclude in their above-cited article thatrecent developments in the field of the natural sciences are opening the way tofinally solve the issue of the subject. As they state, conveniently, neuroscienceand linguistics (as well as computer science, psychology, analytic philosophy,and some social sciences) have now combined in a massive interdisciplinaryendeavor called cognitive science which seeks to settle the major questions ofhuman epistemology.10 Modern cognitive theories have supposedly succeeded

ELAS PALTI60

10. Fitzhugh and Leckie, Agency, Postmodernism, and the Causes of Change, 75.


5/26

in locating an instance of the constitution of meanings that is prior to linguisticstructures, one linked immediately to the perceptual system (that is, a subject).Cognitive science has demonstrated, they state, that the neural control systemenabling physical movement can perform abstract reasoning about the structureof events.11 In short, neuroscience allegedly has solved the old philosophicaldilemma about the relationship between mind and body, a succedaneum ofDescartess pineal gland (the supposed contact-point between the physical andthe psychic). Yet, in order to ground representations on an objective field it isalso necessary for these pre-linguistic and pre-discursive cognitive structures toremain unalterable throughout times and cultures, to constitute a kind of eternalsubstratum of human nature; in sum, a transhistorical subject. There are goodreasons, conclude Fitzhugh and Leckie, to reject the idea that we cognize onlyin language, to accept language itself as developing at least partly from the bio-logical, trans-temporal (as opposed to a wholly localized, culturally constructed)body.12

Neuroscience would thus finally provide these authors the deus ex machina,the subject of change which, they claim, Foucault had to invoke but was not ableto define. Yet we meet here a paradox: that what begins as a search for an expla-nation and a final foundation for historical change only concludes in finding anassumedly eternal essence immutable by nature. The problem this raisesnevertackled by these authorsis how change in history could emerge out of thatwhich is its very denial, how the new could emanate from an immutable subject.Fitzhugh and Leckie should affirm that this transhistorical subject has that whichlanguage allegedly lacks: an immanent drive to development, an inherentimpulse propelling it to change. That is, this claim requires a typically nine-teenth-century teleological premise, of an idealistic matrix, which they them-selves could not really accept. Ultimately, that premise throws us back to theprimitive dilemmas of historical philosophythose Fitzhugh and Leckie tried toavoid by means of their appeal to neurobiology. As the other advocate for thereturn of the subject we mentioned, Manfred Frank, observes, the answer to thesequestions escape by definition the reach of the experimental sciences:

While neurobiology makes breathtaking progress in the comprehension of functions ofour brain, we are as before confronted by the question of the experimental physiologistDu Bois-Reymond: What contribution can even the best physical theory make to fathom-ing the peculiarity of familiarity [i.e., self-consciousness]. We can observe the physical (orinfer it from the physical effects and control it adequately through theoretical terms) butnot the mental. . . . This must have consequences for the form of philosophy as a theoryin its demarcation from the natural sciences. In philosophy, the concerns of subjectivity assuch, unabbreviated, must come to expression.13

The split between science and philosophy is intimately associated, for Frank,with the postulate that the subject, as such, cannot be objectified (this is exactly

the meaning of the German expression Unding in the title of Franks article), but,yet, its existence cannot be denied without falling into self-contradiction. As

THE RETURN OF THE SUBJECT 61

11.Ibid., 77.12.Ibid., 79.13. Frank, Is Subjectivity a Non-Thing, an Absurdity [Unding]?, 189.


6/26


7/26


8/26

that which showed itselfall that remained was to decipher it.19 By the sev-enteenth century, when the natural links by means of which the visible surfacesof things were related to their ultimate source were broken, words became dis-tanced from things. Language thus turned into an artifice to articulate the wholeout of the dispersed fragments on the surface of visible forms. From then on, thesubject would be in charge of reconstructing the logic of their dispersion.

The Age of Representation was thus born. The representing subject came tostand before the represented object as the one who invests it with meaning, pro-viding unity and coherence to the worlds outer chaos of forms and figures.20 Yetto avoid its continuous dispersion, the possibly infinite play of mutual referenceshad, at the same time, to be forced into a closed system that left nothing outside.This meant that even the representing subject itself had to be included in thisOrder too. In the framework of the classical episteme (which, as we said,Foucault sharply distinguishes from the modern episteme), the subject did notescape the realm of representation; the subject of the Enlightenment would besimultaneously representing and represented. We find here a paradox intrinsic tothis particular type of discourse, whose emergence would eventually make itexplode, thus paving the way, at the end of the eighteenth century, for the con-ception of the Subject (with a capital S) that Foucault spoke about.

Although Foucault never states it explicitly, it is clear that he takes the delib-erately ambiguous term subject from the expression with which Hegel openshis Phenomenology of Spirit: the point is to think the Absolute not as aSubstance but as a Subjectas well.21 The subject here at stake, which is nolonger merely a substance, is a reflexive entity, an in itself and for itself, thevery process of positing itself or the mediation of its becoming another one.22

Only then can we speak properly of a modern Subject (and ultimately, of a mod-ern episteme), in the sense Foucault gives to the term: a being to which Historycomes from within. Time now becomes an immanent dimension in it,23 since itcontains within itself the principle of its own transformation (actually, this wasfor nineteenth-century evolutionary thinking the definite attribute of living

ELAS PALTI64

19. Foucault, The Order of Things, 35.

20. The consciousness, characteristic of the classical episteme, of the artificiality of language, ofthe system of the representation, would allow the emergence of subjectivism, but also of its contrary,objectivism. As Foucault points out, an archeological analysis must transcend such an opposition tofind out the epistemological conditions that made it possible: If one wishes to undertake an archeo-logical analysis of knowledge itself, it is not these celebrated controversies that ought to be used asthe guidelines and articulation of such a project. One must reconstitute the general system of thoughtwhose network, in its positivity, renders an interplay of simultaneous and apparently contradictoryopinions possible (ibid., 75).

21. Hegel, Fenomenologa del espritu (Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Econmica, 1985), 15.22.Ibid., 15-16.23. During the classical (early modern) period, temporality appeared as a dimension external to

beings, something that comes to them from their exterior, from the external circumstances which lie

beyond their control, the bleaknesses. As Foucault affirmed: The eras of nature do not prescribethe natural time of beings and their continuity; they dictate the bleaknesses that have constantly dis-persed them, destroyed them, mingled them, separated them, and interwoven them. There is not andcannot be even the suspicion of an evolutionism or a transformism in Classical thought; for time isnever conceived as a principle of development for living beings in their internal organization; it is per-ceived only as the possible bearer of a revolution in the external space in which they live (Foucault,The Order of Things, 150).


9/26


10/26


11/26


12/26

late not of the constancy of things, but of the invariance of certain magnitudesand laws with regard to all transformations of the system of reference.30 It pro-vides the basis for an entirely new conceptual system, gives rise to a new sym-bolic form that would completely rearticulate the order of knowledge, both in thenatural and in the human sciences:

The recognition of the concepts of totality and structure has not deleted the differencebetween cultural and natural sciences. Yet, it has pulled down the barrier that used to sep-arate these two kinds of science. Now culture can focus on the study of its forms, its struc-tures and manifestations more freely and impartially than before, insofar as the otherfields of knowledge have also focused on their own particular problems of form.31

Gestalt-Psychologie is an instance of this; with it, Cassirer says, the old psy-chology of elements becomes structural psychology.32 This common trend inthe natural and the social sciences is highly symptomatic. In Foucaults terms,

this was not merely a conceptual transformation: the very way of being of thingsthen became completely altered; the ground of positivities in which the newregime of knowledge plunged its roots had suddenly mutated.

Theform thus becomes the tie keeping together words and things. Empiricalobjects are downgraded to merely phenomenal realities in order to discover,behind them, not the principle of their formation, but the system of their rela-tionships. As in the classical episteme, order is now placed on the level of repre-sentation (this is what leads Foucault to speak of a return of language).However, it is no longer the infinite space for the play of analogies and differ-

ences of visible phenomena, but is folded upon itself to meet the constructiveprinciple of its own representative configuration (thus ultimately revealing thecontingent nature not only of the objects of knowledge but also of their a prioriconditionsfor example, the subject). The Age of Form becomes indeed theAge of Language; nevertheless, this is no longer understood either as repre-sentation (taxonomy) or as production (philology), but as a system (structure).This will bring about the rebirth of metaphysics. Form, unlike Life, is no longeran empirico-transcendental force; it indicates a second-order (metaphenome-nal) plane of objectivity. As Cassirer put it:

Concerning ideal relations of this sort, judgements are possible that do not need to be test-ed by different successive cases in order to be grasped in their truth, but which are recog-nized once for all by insight into the necessity of the connections. Along with the empir-ical judgements concerning objects of experience, there are thus a priori judgementsconcerning founded objects. While the psychic phenomenon, like color or tone, cansimply be established in its occurrence and properties as a fact, there are judgements thatconnect metaphenomenal objects, like equality and similarity, that are made with con-sciousness of timeless and necessary validity. In place of the mere establishment of a fact,there appears the systematic whole of a rational connection with elements that recipro-cally demand and condition each other. . . . In place of a succession, of a superordinationand a subordination of contents, analysis fixes a relation of strict correlativity. Just as therelation requires reference to the elements, so the elements no less require reference to aform of relation, in which alone they gain fixed and constant meaning.33

ELAS PALTI68

30. Cassirer, Substance and Function: Einsteins Theory of Relativity (New York: Dover, 1923), 404.31. Ernst Cassirer,Las ciencias de la cultura, 145.32.Ibid., 145.33. Cassirer, Substance and Function, 338-339.


13/26

This has profound implications for the way the subject is conceived. To appre-ciate them, consider how all of this differs from both the classical and the modernepistemai. In the classical episteme, the subject, as a substratum of representation,was always already presupposed, was completely knowable though not render-able thematically. In the modern episteme, the subject, as a principle of formation(life, labor, language) becomes something unknowable, but, however, is perfectlythematic, like any other phenomena (because he is an empirico-transcendentaldoublet, man is also the locus of misunderstandingof misunderstanding thatconstantly exposes his thought to the risk of being swamped by his own being34).We find here the paradox that what appeared as absolutely robbed from knowl-edge at once became, for the first time, the object of a particular science, the so-called human sciences (hence their ever-ambiguous epistemological status).

The modern episteme did not tire of proclaiming the end of metaphysics.Life, as well as production and language, did not but point to its own objectivefield of knowledge; it was a thing, lined up with other things, and, at the sametime, the ultimate foundation of all of them. The breakup of the modern epistemeat the end of the nineteenth century initiated a double movement: it introducedagain a gap between the empirical and the transcendental orders (the objectiveand the subjective realms, world and life, respectively), and it also reduplicatedthe regime of representation to fold it back on its own constructive mechanisms.This implies the destruction and dispersion of the notion of subject, whichbecomes contingent on the plurality of systematic relationships within which itsvery being is articulated. A new paradigm of temporality then emerges. Timebecomes diversified, butand this is the main pointit is no longer a functionof a determined kind of being, a Subject, but is an element in a particular con-figuration of a particular place-time. As Cassirer points out in connection withthe theory of relativity:

Is there not found in this last expression the characteristic and decisive oppositionbetween the theory of space and time of critical idealism and the theory of relativity? Isnot the essential result of this theory precisely the destruction of the unity of space andtime demanded by Kant? If all measurement of time is dependent on the state of motionof the system from which it is made, there seem to result only infinitely many and infi-

nitely diverse place-times, which, however, never combine into the unity of the time.. . . The boldness and the high philosophical significance of Einsteins doctrine consists,we read, e.g., in the work of Laue, in that it clears away the traditional prejudice of onetime valid for all systems.35

In this case, the subject (and the same can be said of language) is no longer anatural entity that creates itself through its own self-constitution, but insteadbecomes a function of the given representative configuration (the theory of rel-ativity shows with especial distinctness how, in particular, the thought of func-tion is effective as a necessary motive in each spatio-temporal determination.36)

The development of non-Euclidean geometry put an end to the idea that there isonly one possible way of conceiving of physical space; space is no longer some-


34. Foucault, The Order of Things, 323.35. Cassirer, Substance and Function, 414.36.Ibid., 420.


14/26

thing always presupposed in knowledge (one of the a priori of intuition), with-out thereby becoming an object constructed by a subject, insofar as both theobject and the subject are now placed in the interior of a particular Form; bothare functions in a system. Moreover, these contingently articulated Forms areradically discontinuous with each other; they do not respond to any genetic pat-tern of successive formation. None of these forms can be simply reduced to, orderived from, the others; each of them designates a particular approach, in whichand through which it constitutes its own aspect of reality, Cassirer had alreadystated long before structuralism arose (although contemporaneously toSaussure).37 At this point, the Age of History had ended:

What constantly comes to obstruct and delay the recognition of the pluri-dimensionalityof knowledge is the circumstance that it seems to be destructive of the principle of evo-lution. Actually, no evolution exists, which, in a continuous succession, leads from onedimension to another. We must accept the existence, at any given point, of a generic dif-

ference, which can be established but not explained. It is also obvious that today this prob-lem has lost much of its gravity. Nor in biology do we understand evolution in the sensethat every new form comes up from the former one by the simple accumulation of a seriesof accidental changes. . . . This has introduced a very essential limitation to the principle

Natura non facit saltus. The problematic aspect of this principle has been shown, in thefield of physics, by the theory of quanta, and, in the field of organic nature, by the theo-ry of mutation. Also in the circle of organic life would evolution be at last a vain wordif we understand it as the unfolding of something already given and pre-existent.38

The notion of totality (structure) thus became detached from that of finali-

ty, dissociating, at the same time, necessity from contingency. The category oftotality (the realm of necessity) refers now to self-integrated systems whoseimmanent dynamics tends to the preservation of their inner balance (homeosta-sis) and their own self-reproduction. Historicity therefore could come to sys-tems only from outside them; it indicated the action of an intentional agent (therealm of contingency), one therefore external to structures.

We find here the second conceptual turn, on which the regress to metaphysicswill hinge. The metaphysics of Forms, as we have seen, points to a field of sec-ond-order realities, at once a priori and contingent; they cannot be objectified

from within their own field of knowledge, since they constitute its premises,even though they are immediately graspable. However, beyond or below theseideal objects there still underlies the primary act of institution by which anygiven field is articulated. This institutive act is normally referred to with thename of Life. To put it in the words that the young Lukcs addressed toKierkegaard in his text, Form Breaks Up When Crashing against Life (includ-ed in The Soul and the Forms):

Life never takes the form of a logical system of ideas; from this perspective, the startingpoint of the system is always arbitrary, and its outcome is self-enclosed, merely relative

from the point of view of life, only one possibility among others. There is no system forlife. In life, only the singular, the concrete, exists. To exist is to be different.39

ELAS PALTI70

37. Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms. Volume 1: Language (New Haven: YaleUniversity Press, 1977), 78.

38. Cassirer,Las ciencias de la cultura, 152-153.39. Lukcs,El alma y las formas: Teora de la novela (Barcelona: Grijalbo, 1985), 60.


15/26

Referring the founded order of Forms, of which the subject is a function, backto the contingency that founds it requires positing (in the Fichtean sense) a sec-ond-order subjectivity. The Husserlian ego is no longer the subjectum referred toby Heidegger as the founding instance of the Modern Age; yet neither is it theSubjectreferred to by Foucault. As a matter of fact, Husserl, in his later writingin The Crisis of European Sciences refers to this transcendental egological fieldin terms ofLifeworld (Lebenswelt). In the last instance, both the subject and theobject presuppose a worldwithin which they become constituted as such. Thenotion of world condensed the set of pre-notions, the universe of meaningsimmediately given to consciousness previous to every reflection or analysis,since they are its premise.40

Thus, the return to metaphysics is not a return to the Subject, which is nowplaced within a particular Form, but it refers to a previous instance, one evenanterior to the split between subject and object, and inside of which both subjectand object can become constituted as such. Yet, the crucial point here is that wecan no longer be said to live in a world, but in contingently articulated worlds.Every horizon of meaning refers back to a primitive constitutive instance, thecreative act of a world. The Subjectum thus is rendered only apro-jectum, one ofthe possible manners in which Being appears to itself. Ultimately, phenomenol-ogy confronts us with the radical contingency of our modes of being and ourmodes of understanding the world and ourselves. Structuralism makes manifestthis premise implicit (albeit denied) in the phenomenological concept, and thenturns it against itself, dislocating the assumption of a subjective instance prior toits own conditions of existence (a given World), of any kind ofBeing from whichmeanings emanate. Yet, within the framework of the new regime of knowledge,if deprived of such an instancegiven the fact that systems now, unlike in themodern episteme, lack any dynamics beyond that intrinsic to their own, presentconfiguration, any impulse by which they could transcend themselveschangein history, the emergence of contingency (the implicit premise in this model),cannot be explained. Hence the permanent oscillation in contemporary thinkingbetween structuralism and phenomenology; beyond their apparent opposition,they presuppose and permanently refer back to each other, since they are integralparts of, and together articulate, a shared archeological ground.

What does this have to do with the debate between modernity and postmoder-nity? We can see now how this dispute hinges on that very shared archeologicalground, makes sense only within the framework of the opposition between struc-ture and subject (an opposition that unfolds, in turn, into a myriad of parallelantinomies, such as that between identity and change, science and art, and so on).However, by attaching ethico-political connotations to their disagreement, andfailing to appreciate their shared archeological ground, both modernists and post-modernists misconceive the nature of their controversy, dehistoricizing and turn-


40. Ultimately, the modern rationalist enterprise also entailed a primitive ground; the scientificproject, the technical disposition vis--vis phenomenal objects, became conceivable only within agiven worldin which the universe has been previously detached of its mysteries and secrets. Lastly,the process of secularization is not really a consequence of scientific developments but is its premise.The transcendental ego (which is no longer a Subject) pointed to that primitive intuition (doxa), theopening instance of worlds.


16/26


17/26

of knowing provides the topic for The Order of Things. The former dominatedduring the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the latter, during the nineteenthcentury. However, as Foucault moves onwards in time, his archeological per-spective becomes blurred. As we have seen, he confuses two mutually incom-patible epistemai (the modern and the postmodern, that is, the Age ofHistory and the Age of Form, respectively), thus falling into argumentativeinconsistencies. At this point, we should do to Foucault what he formerly did toHeidegger.

On the one hand, Foucault shows to what extent phenomenology (andhermeneutics) and structuralism are inextricably tied; they share one and thesame archeological ground. Nevertheless, he identifies this ground with the mod-ern episteme, ignoring the conceptual mutation that occurred by the end of thenineteenth century. Both antagonistic currents of contemporary thinking (phe-nomenology and structuralism) are thus seen as merely the culmination of oppo-sites (albeit associated opposites) engendered in the nineteenth century (therebymissing the specific epistemic ground in which that opposition plunges its roots,and how far it departs from the teleological pattern in wich the modern epistemewas founded, whose collapse was the fundamental key permitting its emer-gence).46 This means, on the other hand, that the death of Man, the crisis of themodern episteme, and the subsequent return of language, are therefore placed,for Foucault, in the future. Yet, their first announcements can already be heard inNietzsche, Mallarm, and Saussure.

As Frank remarks, Foucaults is certainly a capricious intellectual categoriza-tion,47 although not because it places structuralism and phenomenology together,but because he makes both of them projections of a former opposition, lodged inthe interior of nineteenth-century Romantic thinking. We meet here a first, obvi-ous, argumentative inconsistency: considering structuralism as fully inscribedwithin the modern episteme but, at the same time, placing Saussure alreadybeyond it. In short, obliterating the substratum of positivities that permitted whathe calls the return of language and that made possible the emergence ofNietzsche, Mallarm, and Saussure (whose linguistic perspective, as we have


those thoughts we term error or illusion, thereby rendering them harmless, so that he would be free,once the step had been taken, to return to them, to explain them, and then to provide a method ofguarding against them. In the modern cogito, on the other hand, we are concerned to grant the high-est value, the greatest dimension, to the distance that both separates and links thought-conscious-of-itself and whatever, within thought, is rooted in non-thought (Foucault, The Order of Things, 324).

46. The critical elevation of language, which was a compensation for its subsidence within theobject, implied that it had been brought nearer both to an act of knowing, pure of all words, and to theunconscious element in our discourse. It had to be either made transparent to the forms of knowledge,or thrust down into the contents of the unconscious. This certainly explains the nineteenth centurysdouble advance, on the one hand towards formalism in thought and on the other towards the discov-ery of the unconscioustoward Russell and Freud. It also explains the tendency of one to move

towards the other, and of these two directions to cross: the attempt, for example, to discover the pureforms that are imposed upon our unconscious before all content; or again, the endeavor to raise theground of experience, the sense of being, the lived horizon of all our knowledge to the level of ourdiscourse. It is here that structuralism and phenomenology find, together with the arrangements prop-er to them, the general space that defines their common place (ibid., 324).

47. Manfred Frank, What is Neostructuralism? (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,1989), 142.


18/26


19/26


20/26

Unlike in the Age of History, and like in the Age of Representation, systemslacking any dynamic impulse, any power for self-transcendence, make under-standing the modes of their transformation require the positing of some kind ofdeus ex machina, someBeing beyond structures. Intentional action now takes theplace of the bleaknesses of the classical system of knowledge.52 However, it ishere that one can notice the kind of inversion that occurred regarding the Age ofRepresentation (making the ego something so different from the Cartesian cogi-to). While in the Age of Representation, Order, the worlds stability, was some-thing simply taken for granted, something both always presupposed and neverthematized, in the Age of Form this is reversed. The occurrence of historical rup-tures and conceptual breaks is now assumed as something immediately evidentand, nonetheless, completely inexplicable. Nor does the invocation of intention-al action (that supposedly bridges the more or less Koselleck spoke about[there always occurs in history more or less than is contained in the given con-ditions]) explain how subjects can project aims which they have not previouslyexperienced as values, that is, which do not already belong to their given axio-logical universe (their present space of experience). This is where the Age ofForm finds its line of fissure through which it finally explodes.

This leads us to a last, fundamental point in understanding Foucaults per-spective. If his perspective, as we have said, still forms an integral part of theepisteme tensed by the opposition between structure and subject, it is placed,however, on its border; it is symptomatic of the new turn in the regimes ofknowledge that would start shortly after the publication of The Order of Things.What he takes as paradigmatic of his own period, namely, the death of Man,actually occurred a century earlier, and is instead the beginning of the disinte-gration of the Age of Form that was then occurring. As Frank points out,Foucaults view marks that angle from which what he calls neo-structuralismwould be displayed. The emergence of neostructuralism is linked to a globalepistemic recomposition comprising the whole order of Western thinking,including the social as well as natural sciences,53 and which would make it pos-sible to thematize that which was impossible to do (but was always presupposed)in the framework of the former episteme (the origin of contingency in history,qualitative mutations). However, for this to become possible, it was necessary tomove beyond the realm of Form.

ELAS PALTI76

52. See note 23.53. In the past twenty years, a series of developments converges to place the notion of event at the

center of scientific and philosophical reflection; this finally breaks the idea of an essential oppositionbetween change and rationality (and, along with it, the whole series of its associated antinomies). Anexample of this is Ilya Prigogines theory of dissipative structures. The notion of eventforms an inte-gral part of that theory, helping to explain the behavior of systems when far from their state of equi-librium (see Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers,La nueva alianza [Madrid: Alianza, 1990] andEntre eltiempo y la eternidad[Madrid: Alianza, 1990]). The notion of event is also associated with that ofmetaevolution in biology (the evolution of the evolutionary processes themselves). See Maturana,Biology of Cognition (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1970); Maturana and Varela, AutopoieticSystems (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1975); and Erich Jantsch, The Self-Organizing Universe(Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1989). At any rate, the very fact that the sciences have begun to analyzeand make thematic processes of non-linear development has rendered obsolete the opposition betweenreason and change (the quantitative and the qualitative Ermarth spoke about), which, as we saw,characterizes the whole Age of Form.


21/26

The recent emergence of a new type of discursive formation in Westernthought is intimately associated with the project of trying to unfold a paradox:given that systems have no inherent impulse to self-transcendence, that is, oncehaving abandoned any teleological premise, and if we discard the idea of thepresence of any transcendental Being, any agent preceding to structures, how ischange possible at all, what are the grounds for agency in history? Here we meetthe key difference distinguishing agency from subject. The point now becomesnot to try to understand the nature, structure, and characteristics of that Beingrepresenting the founding instance of every instituted order, its inner Sense (aswas the project of an egological phenomenology), but those of the objectiveorder in which agency can eventually occur, the premises for an immanentlygenerated temporality; in sum, the modes of structuration-destructuration ofstructures.

This involves transcending their primitive Sense (which was the neo-Kantianphenomenological project) and gaining access into the ambit of its ownconditions of possibility, the instance in which Sense and non-Sense are stillundistinguishable, that which at once founds and destroys Sense. We find herethe cornerstone for neostructuralism. For it, the radical historicity of social sys-tems is conceivable only if we think that these are never completely self-enclosed and self-regulated, that is, that in their center lies a void which, at thesame time that it allows them to become articulated as such, determines their per-manent disjunction with respect to themselves, their opening to an exterior whichis not just an exterior, but inhabits and founds them. As Derrida states:

If totalization no longer has any meaning, it is not because the infiniteness of a field can-not be covered by a finite glance or a finite discourse, but because the nature of the fieldthat is, language and a finite languageexcludes totalization. This field is in effect thatof play, that is to say, a field of infinite substitutions only because it is finite, that is to say,because of being an inexhaustible field, as in the classical hypothesis, instead of being toolarge, there is something missing from it: a center which arrests and grounds the play ofsubstitutions. One could sayrigorously using that word whose scandalous significationis always obliterated in Frenchthat this movement of play, permitted by the lack orabsence of a center or origin, is the movement of supplementarity. One cannot determinethe center and exhaust totalization because the sign which replaces the center, which sup-plements it, taking the centers place in its absencethis sign is added, occurs as a sur-plus, as a supplement.54

From this perspective, the ego as an agent of change should be conceived asneither something previous to structures (the pure institutive act), nor as a mereeffect of structure, as structuralism stated, but rather as an effect of dis-structure.In short, neo-structuralism traces phenomenology and structuralism to theirdenied premise, turning upside down the relationships between sense (Subject)and knowledge (Representation) implicit in it.55 It shows why the reactivation of

sedimented meanings that Husserl strove for,far from revitalizing a given hori-zon, would destroy it, precisely because it would confront that regime of knowl-edge with its primitive void, that which every horizon must occlude in order to


54. Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 289.55. See Derrida, Speech and Phenomena, and Other Essays on Husserls Theory of Signs

(Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973).


22/26

become articulated as such, to be workable and effective: the radical contingencyof its foundations and rationale. Lastly, the phenomenological project would alsoparticipate in this game of disclosure and concealment (Entbergung-Verbergung):at the same time that it posed the instituted character of horizons, it denied thatcharacter as such by putting a Being beneath them. The episteme born from thedislocation of the Age of Form would look, instead, for opening the orders ofknowledge to their inherent historicity. It would no longer invoke a primitivefounding instance, an ego, but would intend to confront these horizons with theirinherent void, that which founds a given horizon but cannot be objectified with-in it without destroying itself (its condition of possibilityimpossibility).

That constitutive void at the heart of every instituted order is what Derridanamed khra: the empty place, prior to the formation of the world, where,according to Plato, the demiurge inscribed things.56 This locates reflection to anew ambit, one no longer that of Husserls ideal objects but that of their premis-es. The same way the ego represented an instance previous to the split betweensubject and object, the khra would represent, in turn, a phenomenological ter-rain logically previous to that of Husserls ego,57 that of the condition of possi-bilityimpossibility of intentional action. Such a displacement entails a new par-adigm of temporality (in Heideggers terms, a temporalization of timedieZeitigung der Zeit), which will lead, in turn, to a new re-formulation of subjec-tivity in history. It is in this regard that Foucault situates himself with respect tothe Age of Form in the same position as Kant does with respect to the Age ofRepresentation, that is to say, he stands on the apex where the given kind of dis-cursivity becomes dislocated. His archeology inevitably pushes to interrogatewhat is presupposed but denied in that form of discursivity; specifically, it rais-es the question about a type of historicity inherent to Forms.

Thus we finally can inaugurate the distinction between agency and subject.The positing of a founding instance of meaning, a transcendental subject, an ego(which is no longer a subject, properly speaking, but a non-subject) actually is,as we remarked, only one possible way of approaching the question of agency inhistory, a particular mode of dealing with the gap that separates a consequent sit-uation from its antecedent structural state. However, in this fashion, rather thanopening the interrogation regarding that systemic gap, it precludes it, since itimmediately closes that gap by placing beneath it a Being from which forms andmeanings emanate. The radical gesture of what Frank calls neostructuralism,and, especially, what Derrida calls deconstructionism consists, precisely, indetaching the question of agency from that of the subject, thereby situating theirwhole problematic at the heart of that structural gap, trying to interrogate theontological void in which the ego (intentional action) can eventually emerge assuch. More than an Urgrund, the khra indicates a point of fissure; it works as

ELAS PALTI78

56. See Derrida, Khra (Crdoba, Arg.: Alcin, 1995). The first mention of this term appears at theend ofDissemination. In Of Grammatology he still referred to this pre-significative field in terms ofinfra-structure.

57. For Husserl, going beyond the ground of self-evident truths represented by the transcendentalego was simply inconceivable. Having arrived at this ego, he stated, one becomes aware of stand-ing within a sphere of self-evidence of such a nature that any attempt to inquire behind it would beabsurd (Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences, 188).


23/26


24/26


25/26


26/26

also allows us to gain critical distance from current debates. Of Foucaults affir-mation of the death of Man we could say the same thing Heidegger said aboutNietzsches expression God is dead: so long as we understand it as a formu-la of unbelief, we are thinking about it theologically in the manner of apologet-ics.63 Certainly for Foucault it was not that the subject once lived and then died(or would die)and, along with it, history, politics, and ethicsyet, neither washis object merely refuting the subjects existence. Rather than affirming ordenying the existence of a subject, what truly mattered to him was tracing theconditions of emergence of the specific mode of historical consciousness (or, inhis own terms, the particular type of discourse) which eventually permitted oneto imagine Man as Subject, and how that discourse eventually collapsed (andtherefore, having already been deprived of the substratum of presuppositions onwhich it rested, it could never be resurrected). Thus interpreted, Foucaults enter-prise (at least as formulated in The Order of Things) makes sense as an attemptto recover what in later debates would be completely obliterated: that is, as anattempt to provide conceptual rigor to historical-intellectual studies; to place thecategories at stake in their particular epistemological niche, in the context onlyof which can they become meaningful as cultural artifacts; and, in this fashion,to remove from these categories their appearance of naturalness. In short, inter-rogating and historicizing the very idea of the existence of a non-contingent linkbetween subject, politics, and history on which the entire debate on the returnof the subject hinges.

Universidad Nacional de QuilmesCONICET

Buenos Aires, Argentina

ELAS PALTI82

63. Heidegger, The Word of Nietzsches God is Dead, The Question Concerning Technology,63 [Solange wir das Wort Got ist tot nur als die Formel des Unglaubens fassen, meinen wir es the-ologische-apologetisch, Heidegger, Nietzsches Wort Gott ist tot (1943),Holzwege. Gesamtaus-gabe, Band 5, 219].

Date post:	03-Jun-2018
Category:	Documents
Upload:	sudhanshu-nautiyal
View:	219 times
Download:	0 times

Hist and Theory

Documents