" [...] I have tried up to this point to bring out one of the basic principles of my way of doing research and of conceiving science. The sort of philosophy of science that I have tried to develop has, from the first, challenged the Germanic distinction between 'explanation' and 'understanding' which has been a kind of a priori Diktat according to which the human sciences are not the same kind of sciences as the rest. It is on the basis of that affirmation that I have been located within the positivist camp. [...] My position is that everything is an object of science, and if there are particular difficulties, particular instruments must be found to overcome them. For me, there are no a priori frontiers.
This sort of nihilism which imposes a priori limits on science is always taking new forms [...] There is today, for example, a neo-nihilist current called postmodernism, which originated in France and which now also spreads in the United States. It is a form of campus radicalism which depends on challenging the kinds of questions that I have formulated so as to deny the possibility of a social science. It is said, for example, 'All science is text, and what the anthropologists bring back with them from the field are texts; there are only ever texts on texts, metatexts: reality does not exist.' This means that young French ethnologists can produce 'brilliant' work without ever going through the considerable ordeal of actual field work. [...]
The reflexivity which I recommend is not an end in itself. [...] Furthermore, there is a tendency to make epistemology, the critique of instruments of knowledge and criticism, an end in itself [...].
But with a more developed consciousness of the fact that the taking of epistemological positions always involves the position in the scientific field of those who take them, and the type of capital which it commands, we see that scientific strategies which are presented as absolute and universal choices are often little more than rationalizations of their own limits."
This sort of nihilism which imposes a priori limits on science is always taking new forms [...] There is today, for example, a neo-nihilist current called postmodernism, which originated in France and which now also spreads in the United States. It is a form of campus radicalism which depends on challenging the kinds of questions that I have formulated so as to deny the possibility of a social science. It is said, for example, 'All science is text, and what the anthropologists bring back with them from the field are texts; there are only ever texts on texts, metatexts: reality does not exist.' This means that young French ethnologists can produce 'brilliant' work without ever going through the considerable ordeal of actual field work. [...]
The reflexivity which I recommend is not an end in itself. [...] Furthermore, there is a tendency to make epistemology, the critique of instruments of knowledge and criticism, an end in itself [...].
But with a more developed consciousness of the fact that the taking of epistemological positions always involves the position in the scientific field of those who take them, and the type of capital which it commands, we see that scientific strategies which are presented as absolute and universal choices are often little more than rationalizations of their own limits."
Bourdieu, Pierre: "Thinking About Limits." In: Featherstone, Mike (ed.): Cultural Theory and Cultural Change. London: Sage, 1992, 46-48.
"In fact, if it is true that a notion of literal meaning is highly problematic, one cannot deny that in order to explore all the possibilities of a text, even those that its author did not conceive of, the interpreter must first of all take for granted a zero-degree meaning, the one authorized the dullest and the simplest of the existing dictionaries, the one authorized by the state of given language in a given historical moment, the one that every member of a community of a healthy native speakers cannot deny. Every sentence can be interpreted metaphorically: even the assertion John eats an apple every morning can be interpreted as "John repeats Adam's sin every day". But in order to support such an interpretation, everybody must take for granted that apple means a given fruit, that Adam is intended as the first man, and that, according to our biblical competence, Adam ate a forbidden fruit.
[...] Here it appears something that cannot find a place within the deconstructive framework: outside the immediate interpretant, the emotional, the energetic, and the logical one -all internal to the course of semiosis- there is the final logical interpretant, that is, the Habit.
The Habit is a disposition to act upon the world, and this possibility to act, as well as the recognition of this possibility as a Law, requires something that is very close to a transcendental instance: a community as an intersubjective quarantee of a nonintuitive, nonnaively realistic, but rather conjectural notion of truth. [...] This principle is not transcendental in the Kantian sense, because it does not come before, but after the semiotic process; it is not the structure of the human mind that produces the interpretation but the reality that the semiosis builds up [the interpretative agreement among the members of a community concerns something that is produced outside semiosis]."
Eco, Umberto: The Limits of Interpretation. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994, 36-37, 39, 40 [I limiti dell'interpretazione. Milano: Bompiani, 1990].
" 'The whole art of historical research, in many cases,' as Raphael Samuel pointed out in one of his last writings, 'is to detach documents from the <<discourse>> of which they formed a part and juxtapose them with qualitatively different others.' This involves not ignoring or discounting the language in which they are written, but comparing it with the language of the other documents in question. Even since the Ancient Greek historian Thucydides, historians have grappled with the problem of 'measuring words against deeds', as Samuel says, 'and attempting to judge their representativity.' It might be illuminating in some cases to juxtapose seemingly unrelated events, or to range freely through history, as the French philosopher-historian Michel Foucault does, ignoring questions of historical specifity unless they can be assimilated to free-floating discourses. But the general value of such an exercise is limited. 'Instead of grubbing abouth the archives,' Samuel complains, 'they (i.e. postmodernists) can take the higher ground where universes of meaning clash and craggy peaks dispel the clouds of unknowing. Instead of painstakingly documenting the past, they can imaginivately re-invent it.' Samuel's feeling that this kind of freedom can only be achieved by a measure of irresponsibility is palpable. [...]
Everyone, even the most diehard deconstructionist, concedes in practice that there is extratextual reality. History is an empirical discipline, and it is concerned with the content of knowledge rather than its nature. Through the sources we use, and the methods with which we handle them, we can, if we are very careful and thorough, approach a reconstruction of past reality that may be partial and provisional, and certainly will not be objective, but is nevertheless true. We know, of course, that we will be guided in selecting materials for the stories we tell, and in the way we out these materials together and interpret them, by literary models, by social science theories, by moral and political beliefs, by an aesthetic sense, even by our own unconscious assumptions and desires. It is an illusion to believe otherwise. But the stories we tell will be true stories, even if the truth they tell is our own, and even if the people can and will tell them differently. Anyone who thinks that the truth about the past does not matter has not, perhaps, lived under a regime like that of the Soviet of Eastern bloc Communists where it is systemically distorted and suppressed."
Evans, Richard J.: In Defence of History. London: Granta Books, 1997, 82-83, 249-250.
"Now you understand Ludmilla's refusal to come
with you; you are gripped by the fear of having also passed over to 'the other
side' and of having lost that privileged relationship with books which is
peculiar to the reader: the ability to consider what is written as something
finished and definitive, to which there is nothing to be added, from which
there is nothing to be removed. But you are consoled by the faith Cavedagna
continues to cherish in the possibility of innocent reading, even here."
(Calvino, Italo: If on a winter's night a traveler. Translated from the Italian by William Weaver. New York: Harcourt, 1981, 115).
"Das Subjekt als Vielheit öffnet bei Calvino -wie schon bei seinen Zeitgenossen Pessoa, Machando, Borges und Nabokov- den einen Horizont des klassischen Subjekts auf eine Vielfalt von Horizonten, auf die Potentialität der ungeschriebenen Welt!
Calvino hat dieses (wie mir scheint:) postmoderne Programm als Buch in der zweiten Person eingelöst, das sich an ein unbestimmtes männliches Du wendet: 'ein Du als Bruder und Doppelgänger womöglich eines scheinheiligen Ich' (S. 168). Das Ich-Du-Verhältnis im Viaggiatore ist dementsprechend nicht zweipolig, sondern dreipolig: dem Autor, der sein Ich an das Du des Lesers delegiert, steht dieser selbst wieder in einer Doppelung von lesendem und gelesenem Leser gegenüber. [...]
Doch nicht der perfekt aus altbekannten Klischees aufgebaute Agententhriller, sondern die in ihn eingeführte Interaktion von Autor, lesendem und gelesenem Leser läßt das hochkomplizierte Spiel des ersten Romananfangs erstehen. Calvino hat hier -wie in allen folgenden Kapiteln- ein schon abgegriffenes Gattungsmuster auf das höchste Niveau ästhetischer Reflexion gebracht. Er hat damit eine Symbiose von Massen- und Hochkultur verwirklicht, die auch andere Werke der Postmoderne kennzeichnet und ihren Anspruch, eine neue ästhetische Epoche einzuleiten, wohl am ehesten erfüllt. Fiktionalität wird dabei zum operativen Prinzip par excellence. Als Medium von Kommunikation ermöglicht sie nicht allein eine wechselseitige Aneignung der Diskurse verschiedener Horizonte von Welt, sondern auch der Rollen im dialogischen Verhältnis von Ego und Alter, Mensch und Mitmensch. Was Fiktionalität im Ich-Du-Verhältnis zu leiten vermag, zeigt Calvinos Werk gewiß am eindrucksvollsten. Im Viaggiatore wird nicht allein die Interaktion von Ego und Alter im Rollentausch von Autor und Leser vorstellbar. Hier wird zugleich im Schicksal des lesenden Du, das die Leerstelle eines namenlosen Ich einnimmt, der schon legendäre Tod des Subjekts auf eine Weise durchgespielt, die zu erkennen gibt, was es besagt, daß -wie eingangs behauptet- die Konstituierung von Subjektivität primär eine Inszenierung seiner selbst für den oder die andern voraussetzt."
(Calvino, Italo: If on a winter's night a traveler. Translated from the Italian by William Weaver. New York: Harcourt, 1981, 115).
"Das Subjekt als Vielheit öffnet bei Calvino -wie schon bei seinen Zeitgenossen Pessoa, Machando, Borges und Nabokov- den einen Horizont des klassischen Subjekts auf eine Vielfalt von Horizonten, auf die Potentialität der ungeschriebenen Welt!
Calvino hat dieses (wie mir scheint:) postmoderne Programm als Buch in der zweiten Person eingelöst, das sich an ein unbestimmtes männliches Du wendet: 'ein Du als Bruder und Doppelgänger womöglich eines scheinheiligen Ich' (S. 168). Das Ich-Du-Verhältnis im Viaggiatore ist dementsprechend nicht zweipolig, sondern dreipolig: dem Autor, der sein Ich an das Du des Lesers delegiert, steht dieser selbst wieder in einer Doppelung von lesendem und gelesenem Leser gegenüber. [...]
Doch nicht der perfekt aus altbekannten Klischees aufgebaute Agententhriller, sondern die in ihn eingeführte Interaktion von Autor, lesendem und gelesenem Leser läßt das hochkomplizierte Spiel des ersten Romananfangs erstehen. Calvino hat hier -wie in allen folgenden Kapiteln- ein schon abgegriffenes Gattungsmuster auf das höchste Niveau ästhetischer Reflexion gebracht. Er hat damit eine Symbiose von Massen- und Hochkultur verwirklicht, die auch andere Werke der Postmoderne kennzeichnet und ihren Anspruch, eine neue ästhetische Epoche einzuleiten, wohl am ehesten erfüllt. Fiktionalität wird dabei zum operativen Prinzip par excellence. Als Medium von Kommunikation ermöglicht sie nicht allein eine wechselseitige Aneignung der Diskurse verschiedener Horizonte von Welt, sondern auch der Rollen im dialogischen Verhältnis von Ego und Alter, Mensch und Mitmensch. Was Fiktionalität im Ich-Du-Verhältnis zu leiten vermag, zeigt Calvinos Werk gewiß am eindrucksvollsten. Im Viaggiatore wird nicht allein die Interaktion von Ego und Alter im Rollentausch von Autor und Leser vorstellbar. Hier wird zugleich im Schicksal des lesenden Du, das die Leerstelle eines namenlosen Ich einnimmt, der schon legendäre Tod des Subjekts auf eine Weise durchgespielt, die zu erkennen gibt, was es besagt, daß -wie eingangs behauptet- die Konstituierung von Subjektivität primär eine Inszenierung seiner selbst für den oder die andern voraussetzt."
Jauß, Hans Robert: "Italo Calvino: >Wenn ein Reisender in einer Winternacht<. Plädoyer für eine postmoderne Ästhetik". In: Jauß, Hans Robert: Studien zum Epochenwandel der ästhetischen Moderne. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1989, 283, 289-290.
[The Shoah as Posthistory]
"On the other hand, it is possible to claim that Stoekl's argument can only be articulated from a dialectical perspective which opposes history and a 'meta' or 'post'-historical language-based philosophy. Yet, this does not accurately characterize the constantly articulated, continually broken encounter between history and writing staged by Blanchot, who does not theorize these terms as being opposed, but rather allows both discourses to subsist or to brush against each other in a disjunctive fashion within a single text. The fragmentary structure itself articulates this uneasy relation of history to language, because the fragment, in the philosophical tradition of Schlegel and Nietzsche, is understood not as the fragment of a whole, but rather as the suspension of any possibility of a totality, including the totalization always invoked, if never realized, by historical knowledge. In a similar way, it is possible to recognize Kofman's use of narrative disjunction as a representation of the failure of history and language either to exclude each other or to collapse into a seamless whole. [...]
The difficulty of describing unimaginable experiences in ordinary language reflects the gulf which separates those who have lived through a nightmare in which all normal expectations of human behavior have been overturned, and those whose daily lives have continued more or less as before. This gulf made it impossible to communicate using a shared idiom and familiar terms; indeed, the rupture of experience seemed to call for a rupture in language. On Antelme's account, the survivor who is forced to use 'everyday' language soon begins to feel that what he or she is saying is unimaginable. [...]
As we have noted, Antelme presents the turn to literature as a response to the unimaginable. Although as Kofman suggests, we cannot simply take refuge in the idea that the survivors' descriptions represent something 'unimaginable' (Paroles suffoquées 44), opening the door to the Holocaust deniers' claim that they are 'unbelievable'; something fundamental is clearly at stake in a community's inability to assimilate the most horrifying accounts of persecution. This resistance reflects the gap between those who have lived through a definitive break with the continuity of experience, and those who have not. [...]
Antelme articulates the fact that from the perspective of normality, and within the frame of conventional language, the survivor's experience begins to appear 'unimaginable' even to himself, alien even to the self which experienced it. [...]
For Antelme, however, the experience of bodily need, and in particular of hunger, manifests itself as a foreign presence within the self. Blanchot picks up on this idea of an alterity within the self in his discussion of L'Espèce humaine in L'Entretien infini, where he renders Antelme's account of physical exigency as: 'le besoin qui n'est plus le sien propre, mais le besoin vide et neutre . . . comme si, me nourrissant, ce n'est pas moi que je nourrissais mais comme si j'acceuillais l'Autre, hôte non de moi-même mais de l'inconnu et de l'étranger.'
This passage gives expression to the way in which, though they are fundamental to the sense of self, bodily needs can appear to consciousness as an alien presence. Though this alterity can be designated, it cannot be represented, for the reason that the 'other' can only be represented if first translated into the terms of the selfhood and identity. Blanchot, however, locates in the impossibility of establishing a relation to the other within the self a place in which a relation to others becomes possible: 'déchu de moi, étranger à moi-même, ce qui s'affirme à ma place, c'est l'étrangeté d'autrui - l'homme comme absolument autre - étranger et inconnu, le dépossédé et l'errant . . .' (L'Entretien infini 195); 'chacun s'est trouvé . . . privé de soi et contraint d'être autrui pour soi même' (198)."
Dobie, Madeleine: "Sarah Kofman's Paroles suffoquées: Autobiography, History, and Writing 'After Auschwitz' ". French Forum 22 (1997), 329-332 [319-341]. [4.1.2022]
"Thus perhaps at stake has always been the murderous capacity of images:
murderers of the real; murderers of their own model as the Byzantine icons
could murder the divine identity. To this murderous capacity is opposed the
dialectical capacity of representations as a visible and intelligible mediation
of the real. All of Western faith and good faith was engaged in this wager on
representation: that a sign could refer to the depth of meaning, that a sign
could exchange for meaning and that something could guarantee this exchange God,
of course. But what if God himself can be simulated, that is to say, reduced to
the signs which attest his existence? Then the whole system becomes weightless;
it is no longer anything but a gigantic simulacrum: not unreal, but a
simulacrum, never again exchanging for what is real, but exchanging in itself,
in an uninterrupted circuit without reference or circumference.
So it is with simulation, insofar as it is opposed to representation.
Representation starts from the principle that the sign and the real are
equivalent (even if this equivalence is Utopian, it is a fundamental axiom).
Conversely, simulation starts from the Utopia of this principle of equivalence,
from the radical negation of the sign as value, from the sign as reversion and
death sentence of every reference. Whereas representation tries to absorb
simulation by interpreting it as false representation, simulation envelops the
whole edifice of representation as itself a simulacrum.
These would be the successive phases of the image:
1 It is the reflection of a basic reality.
2 It masks and perverts a basic reality.
3 It masks the absence of a basic reality.
4 It bears no relation to any reality whatever: it is its own pure simulacrum.In the first case, the image is a good appearance: the representation is
of the order of sacrament. In the second, it is an evil appearance: of the
order of malefice. In the third, it plays at being an appearance: it is of the
order of sorcery. In the fourth, it is no longer in the order of appearance at
all, but of simulation.
The transition from signs which dissimulate something to signs which
dissimulate that there is nothing, marks the decisive turning point. The first
implies a theology of truth and secrecy (to which the notion of ideology still
belongs). The second inaugurates an age of simulacra and simulation, in which
there is no longer any God to recognize his own, nor any last judgement to
separate truth from false, the real from its artificial resurrection, since
everything is already dead and risen in advance.
When the real is no longer
what it used to be, nostalgia assumes its full meaning. There is a
proliferation of myths of origin and signs of reality; of second-hand truth,
objectivity and authenticity. There is an escalation of the true, of the lived
experience; a resurrection of the figurative where the object and substance
have disappeared. And there is a panic-stricken production of the real and the
referential, above and parallel to the panic of material production. This is
how simulation appears in the phase that concerns us: a strategy of the real,
neo-real and hyperreal, whose universal double is a strategy of deterrence [my underlining]."
Baudrillard, Jean: Selected Writings. Second edition, revised and expanded. Edited and introduced by Mark Poster. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2001, 173-174 [Simulacres et Simulation. Paris: Galilée, 1981]. [27-28.1.2022]
