Let Us Attack "Continental Philosophy" & Philosophers!: Thursdays in Academia
Theodore Adorno, Greta Karplus, & a Late-Capitalist Frankfurt-School Marriage; or, why what Theodore Adorno needed was not respect and attention from philosophers, but treatment by psychiatrists for a tremendously dire case of patriarchal misogynistic self-oblivious delusion. Or, bluntly, for being a callow ahole egomaniac (which is, admittedly, a common failure mode for boys whom too many authority figures told them they were very special when young, but even so)…
How did I get there? By chasing links due to an insufficient ability to keep myself on-task.
Let me start with a little throat-clearing: Back in the Day, when I was a college senior, I had the extraordinary privilege of taking a seminar on “Deconstruction” from the truly brilliant Stanley Cavell.
I ended it thinking that much of “Continental Philosophy” was an intellectual power game, in which sometimes the—very true—argument that “the map is not the territory” was decisive and led to the rejection of a group of authors positions, sometimes it did not, and that the only intelligible reasons for why it was sometimes one and the other were reasons of social-network allegiance and academic-positional power.
In short, bad “Continental Philosophy” was a series of the following intellectual moves:
Viewpoint X is bad because it is a map.
The map is not the territory.
Therefore we reject viewpoint X.
Here is my map: viewpoint Y.
My map is good.
FULL STOP.
Now there are good “Continental Philosophers”! I was and am wowed by Keith Tribe’s deployment of Foucaultian theory to understand the British classical economists: <https://braddelong.substack.com/p/hoisted-from-e-archives-two-months>
But there are a very great many bad Continental Philosophers.
And so I find myself agreeing with Matthew Adelstein here:
Matthew Adelstein: How Continental Philosophers “Argue” <https://benthams.substack.com/p/how-continental-philosophers-argue>: ‘On the unseriousness of the discipline…. One way [bad] continental philosophers argue is by brazenly asserting “A is not B… but instead C” where C is some random thing that makes no sense… [and so] A is C and anyone who thinks it’s B is naive…. An example… from Butler…. “Gender is not to culture as sex is to nature; gender is also the discursive/cultural means by which ‘sexed nature’ or ‘a natural sex’ is produced and established as ‘prediscursive’, prior to culture, a politically neutral surface on which culture acts. This construction of ‘sex’ as the radically unconstructed will concern us again in the discussion of Lévi Strauss and structuralism in chapter 2…”. Got that?…
And I see a protest:
Nathan Witkin: Continental Philosophy Needs Better Critics—and Defenders <https://arachnemag.substack.com/p/continental-philosophy-needs-better>: ‘Regardless of what you think of this passage’s substance, we should be able to agree it does not contain an inference…. There is a series of positive claims that are related…. They do not, however, entail one another, nor is there any evidence that Butler thinks they do. Adelstein is conflating a common rhetorical pattern (“A is not B, but C”) with a “rule of inference,” and suggesting that it is continental philosophers, rather than he who have confused the two…
But what, then, is the reason that Butler claims that we ought to view A as not B but C?
Why should we of that A (the relationship of gender to culture) as not B (as sex is to nature, i.e., a fitting of a conceptual frame to the patterns of mammalian reproduction that exist out there in the real world), but instead as C (gender is the discursive/cultural means by which ‘sexed nature’ is produced)?
I mean: certainly B is there: There are processes of meiosis and fertilization, there are animals in which flipped genetic switches make some providers of ova and a substantially disjoint set providers of sperm, there are all kinds of other biological structures and patterns that usually but not always cohere with those flipped switches (but not always! seahorse fathers carry the young, after all!). And we call this “sex” and we call highly correlated cultural labels of biological bodies “gender”. But we all agree that this is a map, not the territory: There are no platonic ideals of ♂ and ♀out there. There is no “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created He him; male and female created He them…”. (This is so, even though most human cultures assume that there are such platonic ideals of ♂ and ♀out there and the assumption is so strong that it seriously and badly misled Platon as to the inner structure of the universe.)
But while you can truly say that gender is not congruent to biological sex in nature, Butler provides us with no good reasons, anywhere, to take “gender… [to be] the discursive/cultural means by which ‘sexed nature’ or ‘a natural sex’ is produced…”
Our homines habilenses ancestors had a sexed nature before there was any human culture, after all.
So I went down the rabbit hole. And, today, chasing links leads me to see another protest, this time about Matthew on Theodore Adorno:
James: Arguing for Continental Philosophy <https://enrichedjamsham.substack.com/p/arguing-for-continental-philosophy>: ‘Continental philosophy…. aims to describe experience, often with a focus on “problematizing,” and questioning received wisdom, and… critiquing dominant power structures… to help you to see your existence, your culture, and the world, in a new, more critical light. A representative quote [from Theodore Adorno’s Minima Moralia:
“Marriage, living on as an abject parody in a time that has removed the basis of its human justification, usually serves today as a trick of self-preservation: the two conspirators deflect outward responsibility for their respective ill-doing to the other while in reality existing together in a murky swamp. The only decent marriage would be one allowing each partner to lead an independent life, in which, instead of a fusion derived from an enforced community of economic interests, both freely accepted mutual responsibility. Marriage as a community of interests unfailingly means the degradation of the interested parties, and it is the perfidy of the world’s arrangements that no-one, even if aware of it, can escape such degradation. The idea might therefore be entertained that marriage without ignominy is a possibility reserved for those spared the pursuit of interests, for the rich. But the possibility is purely formal, for the privileged are precisely those in whom the pursuit of interests has become second nature—they would not otherwise uphold privilege…”
Okay. That was Adorno.
What does James have to say to explain it? This:
This passage… [is] aiming to cast marriage in a new light, forcing the reader to reconsider what marriage means…. What if marriage were simply a cultural arrangement enabling you to deflect responsibility, and an economic arrangement forcing you to remain tied to each other[?]… You might not agree with this reframing… but reframing is the goal… not careful argumentation…. Use words… to avoid any connotations or implications… [engage in] a degree of purposeful obfuscation… [to] serve the goal of problematizing. They also like to keep themselves from being pinned down to any one interpretation…
My response is: No. Simply Not. Bulls*. The rhetorical moves of bad Continental Philosophy—1. Viewpoint X is bad because it is a map. 2. The map is not the territory. 3. Therefore we reject viewpoint X. 4. Here is my map: viewpoint Y. 5. My map is good. 6. FULL STOP—are best understood not as intellectual arguments but rather as deployments of social-network power and as products of human psychology.
And so I have once again come back up the same rabbit hole I came back up back in 1982, with much the same conclusion: that looking inside the texts of the bad “Continental Philosophers” (NOT ALL CONTINENTAL PHILOSOPHERS!) is the very worst place to seek for any valid insights.
Thus one had to look very much outside the text at the psychological life-experiences and socio-cultural-institutional settings of the bad “Continental Philosophers” to understand why they were at the rhetorical level, spending so much energy and time doing nothing but wasting their own and their students’ brains—and trying to waste mine. (Admittedly, I had been predisposed to think this by having read, the year before, E.P. Thompson’s The Poverty of Theory critique of Continental Philosopher Louis Althusser the year before; which reading had been followed a month later by Althusser’s descent into deadly madness and his murder of his wife Hélène Rytmann.)
Let me stick to Adorno. Contrary to what James claims, Adorno, after all, is not saying “the standard map is not the territory: here are some other ‘what-if’perspectives on it that give us a broader and less constricted view”. There is no “what if…?” in Adorno’s passage.
There are, instead, declarations:
THIS IS HOW IT IS:
Marriage… abject parody… [no] human justification… conspirators deflect[ing]… responsibility for their respective ill-doing… an enforced community of economic interests… degradation of the interested parties…
What happens when I take the black marks on the pages of the codexes of Minima Moralia and Dialectic of Enlightenment, when from it I spin-up a subTuring instantiation of the mind of Theodore Adorno, run it on its separate partition in my wetware, and then ask SubTuringAdorno why his map is to be preferred? In what sense is his view less “not the territory” than, say, Archbishop Cranmer’s view: that marriage is for the sake of the “children… [as] a remedy against sin and to avoid fornication… [and] for the mutual society help, and comfort, that the one ought to have of the other, both in prosperity and adversity”?
I get no intelligible answer at all.