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Wednesday, May 19, 2010

Lost and found in the archives

So I showed up at UC-Irvine a day early, because even though some of the Rorty archives were born digital, most of them were born analog, and I wanted to check them out.  (Note to distressed California taxpayers: there was no honorarium involved, and I paid for my extra night of lodging.  Just for the record.) About half of my talk dealt with blog discussions of Rorty’s work, like this one and this one and this one, on which I relied heavily.  I promised Dave Maier I would not make the mistake I always make, so, in a deconstructive spirit, I made it again anyway, but differently this time.

This time I merely claimed that human deliberations about Neptune and quarks and the cosmic microwave background radiation involve intersubjective agreement, but it’s intersubjective agreement about the not-human.  That doesn’t make it any more “foundational” than human deliberations about justice or beauty, but it does mean that when Neptune and quarks and the cosmic microwave background radiation are disclosed to us, we have to understand them precisely as entities which beforehand already were.  Just like Heidegger says in section 44 of Being and Time:

Newton’s laws, the principle of contradiction, any truth whatever—these are true only so long as Dasein is.  Before there was any Dasein, there was no truth; nor will there be any after Dasein is no more. . . .  To say that before Newton his laws were neither true nor false, cannot signify that before him there were no such entities as have been uncovered and pointed out by those laws.  Through Newton the laws became true; and with them, entities became accessible in themselves to Dasein.  Once entities have been uncovered, they show themselves precisely as entities which beforehand already were.

I have been mulling over that passage for 25 years now, and that’s part of what my Rorty Story is about.  But first, let me make clear to Dave and everyone of like-Dave mind that in talking about these entities-which-beforehand-already-were I am not (as I said at the conference) indulging in any Stupid Realist Tricks.  First, I am not suggesting that physics is not a language, that it gives us direct unmediated access to the way the natural world would describe itself if it could; on the contrary, I keep harping on the cosmic microwave background radiation because (a) it’s really important, being physical evidence of the Big Bang, and (b) its discovery involved a Latourian network of scientists, wherein one guy realized that the inadvertent finding made by other guys just might be related to this other guy’s unpublished paper.  (Details.) Second, I imply no teleology, no sense that discoveries in physics are moving us somewhere progressively and incrementally, and that someday we’ll finally get it right once and for all; on the contrary, I strongly suspect it’s quantum turtles all the way down, in all the extant universes.  And last, I am not suggesting that the kind of knowledge we obtain from physics is a template for all other kinds of human knowledge, that it affords us a model of the way we could deliberate about justice or beauty if we just tried hard enough; on the contrary, I’m saying that it’s a highly specialized and ungeneralizable kind of knowledge that involves intricate interpretive protocols for understanding stuff that isn’t Dasein and doesn’t have Dasein’s interpretive protocols.  But the truths we obtain by means of those protocols will be truths only so long as Dasein is, because when Dasein disappears, nobody’s going to talk about “truth” anymore.

I hope that’s clear.  Because now it is story time.

So it’s the day before the conference, I have only four or five hours to work with, and I decide to look through a couple boxes of Rorty’s papers, lectures, syllabi, and notes from the 1980s and 1990s.  (I also decide to look through one box of juvenilia, just because.) I find some good stuff, and I incorporate it into my paper, like this fine example of what John Holbo (in the fifth link above) calls Rorty’s “rhetoric of anticipatory retrospective”:

we shall only get the full benefit of either Hegelian historicism or pragmatist anti-representationalism when we have become as insouciant about the question “did human beings have intrinsic dignity, and human rights, before anybody thought they did?” as we are about the question “did transfinite cardinal numbers exist before Cantor found a way to talk about them?”

Then I decide to start leafing through the correspondence files, looking for a correspondence theory of truth.  (That joke killed in the Poconos, folks.  I’ll be here all week.) It was a little like Abe Simpson’s rendering of Thomas Edison’s reading of the alphabet over the radio: I started with “A.” Then “B.” “C” would usually follow....

And in the B’s, I had a genuine authentic unheimlich moment.  I wasn’t surprised to see my correspondence with Rorty from 1994-95, which consists of a series of letters about Public Access in which Rorty chastised me for my dismissive attitude toward social democrats like Howe and Schlesinger and I insisted that The Disuniting of America, like Bernstein’s Dictatorship of Virtue, was a hysterical book, and not in a good way, either.  It was nice to see all that in its very own sub-folder, but I remembered it well.  What surprised me was a stray item from 1985, a handwritten letter on three pages of yellow legal paper.  The letter appeared to be in my handwriting ... because it was! It was dated sometime in June 1985, and it was basically an agonized request for an extension on my overdue paper. 

I have no idea why Rorty kept it, but reading it was like the moment in Chamber of Secrets when Harry opens Tom Riddle’s diary and gets transported back to Riddle’s days at Hogwarts.  After taking Rorty’s Heidegger seminar that spring, I had the option of taking a final exam or writing a stand-alone paper.  The exam was by far the easier option, and one of the questions, “to what extent does part one of Being and Time advance a pragmatist theory of truth,” was an implicit invitation to go over our class notes from the first four weeks of class and say, “well, it pretty much does, just like Rorty says it does, see.” I didn’t want to do that, because I had my own little take on part one of Being and Time, but I wasn’t sure how to go about writing it down.

Well, now I was in dangerous territory—and the danger might be familiar to some of you.  I now had a late paper hanging over my head, and worse, it was a late paper for a Famous and Distinguished Professor.  I was 23.  Let me put it this way: the third link above is titled (by Holbo) “Dave Maier Tells You Interesting Stuff about Rorty.” It is indeed a very interesting post.  But I had no interesting stuff to say; I was quite convinced that there was nothing I could put into a paper that would be of any interest to Rorty whatsoever.  Week by week, that conviction deepened, as did my sense of dread.  So in June, just before Rorty left for a trip to China, I clenched my teeth (no, not really) and sat down to write a letter (a) sketching out my idea and (b) asking for an extension.

You know the genre, surely: crazed, anxious graduate student expounds on the details of a promising but never-to-be-written essay.  The first two and a half pages walk through the half-formed argument, in which I suggest that what Rorty took to be the “pragmatist” aspects of Being and Time (the categories of the vorhanden and zuhanden, or “present-at-hand” and “ready-to-hand”) are just setups for the real payload, the insistence that “truth” is a matter of “disclosure” (aletheia), and that one of the reasons Heidegger goes to such trouble to establish those categories is to persuade us that factual assertions, far from being the locus of truth, are mere present-at-hand entities that get stuff done.  This may sound like a pragmatist critique of positivism (which is no doubt why Rorty liked it), but it ain’t where Heidegger’s going; in sections 43 and 44, he’s going to show us that since assertions are not the locus of truth (as he has conclusively demonstrated), truth must something else, namely, the disclosure of Being specific to Dasein.

This much is probably obvious to Heideggerians, but give me a break.  I was 23.  The tricky part—the part on which I was stuck—lay in the realization that I was more or less saying that part one of Being and Time involves this elaborate performative contradiction whereby Heidegger argues logically and patiently (and laboriously, good lord) that argument is not where truth lives.  I had the idea that perhaps this might shed some light on the famous “turn,” which, for me, might amount to Heidegger saying (among other things), “you know, I’m not going to argue anymore that assertions are merely present-at-hand—I’m just going to go straight to aletheia and disclosure, and write sweeping accounts of philosophy since the pre-Socratics, meditations on Romantic poets and the phrase ‘it gives being,’ and a bunch of stuff about the clearing and the jug and the fourfold, so there.”

And that paper probably would remain unwritten to this day (with the world so much the poorer for it), had Janet not realized, some months after I asked Rorty for that extension, that she was pregnant.  “ZOMG,” I said (no, not really), “if we’re going to have a baby, I need to finish that damn Rorty paper.” My anxiety about the-entity-that-would-become-Nick quashed all my anxiety about the-entity-that-was-the-paper-I-could-not-write, and I wrote it in a frenzy over four or five days.  It turned out to be the last paper I would ever write out longhand before typing.  And it turned out, when I finally finished typing, to be fifty pages.  After stewing over the essay for months and months, I had become the Graduate Student From Hell, turning in my paper very late and very long.

If there are any graduate students reading this, do not do this.  It is bad.

But it was a formative experience.  Not only because it got me off the schneid, Heidegger-wise, but because it taught me how to manage anxieties: that is, by using real ones to dissolve pseudo ones.  “Merciful Moloch we’re going to have a baby so I have to finish this class so that I can finish my coursework so that I can write my dissertation and try to get a job” is so much weightier than “what if Rorty doesn’t like/ is bored by/ disagrees with my essay” that there’s no point wasting any time with the latter.  Priorities, people. 

Still, I can’t believe Rorty kept that letter.  I recognized the kid who wrote it, a leaner and squirrelier version of the person who’s writing this, but more important, I remembered that whole weird and directionless Charlottesville summer, working at the National Legal Research Group, not writing, breaking up my band (and then recording a posthumous album anyway), wondering whether I should stay in graduate school.

So I guess there’s a moral here, and the moral is that I have forgotten my umbrella.  No, wait, that’s not it.  It’s that you never know what’s going to wind up in the archives.  Even your crazed letter, “Dear Mr. Rorty [that is the custom at the University of Virginia, btw], can I have an extension because the dog ate my vorhanden and I stayed up late Being-with-others and overslept and I promise to turn in my paper precisely when I finish it which should be any day now sincerely yours,” might be in there, somewhere, for scholars of the future to wonder and snicker at.  You have been warned.

Liz Losh (who organized the whole thing) has a wonderfully detailed account of the conference, here, here, here, here, and here.  Many thanks to Liz for all her great work.  Ian Bogost’s version is here; his witty and provocative paper is here (.pdf, and w/o the great visuals).  And last but not least, it was totally awesome to meet Mary Rorty.

x-posted.

Posted by Michael on 05/19 at 08:08 AM
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