Comments by "harvey young" (@harveyyoung3423) on "Peter Whittle: Our Country & Culture Are Struggling to Survive" video.
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Essence, freedom and political discourse: A Prolegomena to reading Jean-François Lyotard.
During the live chat yesterday i emphasised Peter Whittle's use of "essence" during the discussion. I did this in part because i came to the live program already with a problem in mind that could be described as a "essence" problem. That is from watching particularly, but not exclusively, BBC News programs i have become aware of how journalists, interviewing members of the public, appear to have a tendentious agenda operating, where in, the interviewer will listen to feelings and first person descriptions and then move to, sometimes even elicit, the foregrounding of one aspect of the event under discussion, an aspect that usually fits in with or can expand an already existing policy, or policy proposal. Sometimes the policy that then "abducts" the event is one already ongoing or in development, it can be that it is the policy of a particular political party, in which case the event just leads to a familiar pollical dispute both sides marshalling science and law, but more often the policy agenda is one in which all political parties are in agreement. A good example here would be the use of mental health to name a politically difficult event, and propose new mental health policy. in a way then the News and journalism is really a form of explanation and justification to the population for government and institutional policy that will happen anyway. The events then appear more as tools of advertising the policy. This seems to be somewhat less than good journalism. Already we are playing around with notions of essence here, but for me the issue comes into view though the discourse chains of the interview. That is journalist says tell us what happened to you, then the guest says something, the interviewer asks them how they feel, they reply, we are drawn in though a natural human sympathy, even though its on TV, and pretty quickly then the journalist turns to an expert in some field and institution, who already have the answer, and then a politician to make this into a policy.
Now in discourse linguistics and discourse pragmatics and such scientific disciplines in academia and mental health care too there is the problem of whether one statement in some way determines the response or at least the category or set of possible "relevant" responses. You know it is possible that A says "Its going to rain" and B replies "I am having chilli for tea". Now this could be viewed as an anomalous response by B ie in some ways "disconnected" from the previous statement by A. It could come to mean though, after a few more "exchanges" or "moves", that B often has Chilli when it is cold and raining. But everyone must have had the experience of saying something and the respondent's response, seems to miss the point or they just utilise all statements towards a their own pre set goals, if indeed it such moves could be called a "response" at all rather than mealy a hypothetical use, a theft of the speakers words without we might say "recognition", or even "understanding" but understanding has become all about absorbing feelings and sympathy only or at most trying for "empathy" for their "point of view", leaving reason and science institutions and politics, the experts to take it up how they see fit, or useful.
Discourse linguistics and pragmatics have many parents: but on the one hand the context of its emergence in teaching and academia was to tech people effective and efficient utilisation of words and sentences to get something done. Ie the language “in itself” is “seen as” a kind of technology to achieve goals: it is meant to mediate then hypothetical imperatives in this project. This kind of approach fitted well with both the mid-century American context of language and advertising, and later in teaching people how to talk in offices efficiently. It has a kind of double raw economic model going on here in terms of: actions are measured in terms of pre-determined criteria of successful outcomes, and the discourse exchange was modelled on economic exchange and then game theory usually framed in terms of competition between A and B. This approach is a strange intellectual development from mid-century Oxford Ordinary Language Philosophy particularly J.L. Austin “How to do things with words” and Paul’s Grice’s Criticisms of Ordinary language and his shift to what would become discourse theory, but in America I think it entered a context still very indebted to C.L. Stevenson view that langue is a tool and a psychological tool to elicit or cause, emotions in the listener by the speaker. In this sense though there are many words and context which create a response of silence. What folk people call throwing a dead cat onto the table. This can be some horrifying description of an event, or the use of statements and principals that have the feeling of being self evident or irrefutable or foundational. “we are about saving lives” or “we are about freedom” or “we are about safety”. If the former example looks like an extreme case of the need for pain avoidance and protection from harm, the latter looks like the attempt to propose an absolute natural law type principle an absolute unconditioned good, or an absolute unconditioned justice. I this way though we see how discourse can resemble inductive type reasoning from examples and deductive type reasoning from principles. In this sense discourse theory is the modern descendent of logic and reason, wherein the logical connectives of necessity operate between propositions in exchanges. Obviously in the real world, not in logic text books, conversation and argument is more chaotic and unpredictable: you start in one place and after “sometime” end up talking about something completely different. In politics it is usually one person trying to force a deduction or induction upon the opponent, in this they might just deposit a whole deduction onto the listener like maths proof, or they can trick the listener into making a move they are already prepared for and can take it “logically” to a place the listener does not want to go to.
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Part 4: My board point is that there is a link between the embracing of man as freedom and creativity by both the left and the right, they both are in tension with the metaphysical tradition and the notion of essences, and then by synergy the freedom and creativity has for a long time being eating away at different categories and distinctions fine grained to start with eg the family as in itself, then the family as a economic part of an economic machine, then as the transmitter of traditional gender roles. Econ come from Aristotle economy as the household, which is odd. However once the household is placed into a universe of economic relations it is subsumed and sublated, similar to someone who might think having a coffee table in a shop door way might class as a living room. These are differences of freedom but to the point where the object that was meant to be free has being rather dissolved into the infinite totality or shredded down to a pile of grain. We might think we need to limit freedom then for tradition, but in this we would only mean the creation of definitions and probably more sciences to set limits. Although we linked essence and definition together with the Ancient Greeks, I think it is clear that this neither works as limit or is desirable in itself.
While Heidegger is the anti-essentialist for Continental thought, it is Wittgenstein who has being given this role by many in Analytical Anglo American thought, from his Philosophical Investigations. The creativity and freedom interpretation of Wittgenstein though is most evident in Jean-François Lyotard especially “The Post-Modern Condition”, “The Differand” “Just Gaming” and “Essays on the Beautiful and the Sublime” the later of course deals with Kant and the conservative thinker Burke, but has had an impact in legal theory and jurisprudence and judicial judgement. 25 years ago I found “The Postmodern Condition” fairly easy since I was already familiar with Wittgenstein, but “The differand” and “Just Gaming” I recall were very difficult. Anyway I’ve just got them all off of Amazon for just a few quid, the Essay on the Sublime is very expensive now. I started a course on it in the early 1990s and dropped it after 3 weeks, I was fresh out of the physics lab, and inclined to the student bar though, pretty much at that time.
Correction note: Sometime ago I mentioned the work on modality of Ruth Barcan Marcus and that she had done the Oxford John Locke Lectures last year this was wrong, she passed away in 2012.
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