The Politics of Logic: Chapter 2 Notes and Comments

See here for notes on chapter one.

In what follows Livingston describes and exhibits through a few examples the shared “paradoxico-critical” orientation that captures the most important elements of the legacy of the 20th century critical approaches of continental and analytic philosophy. He suggests that the distinguishing characteristics of  the PC orientation in both its continental and analytic forms are:

1. an elaboration of paradoxes that concerns the limits of language and are involved in the syntactic or symbolic manifestation of the structure of language
2. the critical use of such paradoxes to contest and destabilize assumptions about the consistency or coherence of this structure
   1. Or what is thought to authorize, originate, or maintain it, either on a theoretical or a political/practical level

The PCO  and the paradoxes that define it originate with internal problems that arise when trying to theorize language as a structure of signs or symbols. Livingston suggests that the methodological specificity and the structuralist tradition that starts with Saussure are founded on these sorts of attempts. In this chapter he will tell the parallel developments of PC in both analytic and continental structuralist traditions.

Structuralists attempt to outline the principles and rules underlying language based on the original principles. The spontaneous political philosophy of this orientation is conventionalism. This is because the original connection between signs and their meanings is a matter of an arbitrary institution of rules of language. But, the CC project (making sense of language through its structure) leads to a series of paradoxes that are problematic for the boundary-drawing project once language is seen as a total object of linguistic description. This influences the development of both continental and analytic philosophy in the 20th century and the breakdown of this project leads to the PCO.

Structuralism

Saussure (Course in General Linguistics from 1906-1911)

The most radical and historically transformative aspect of Saussure’s conception is his treatment of language as a whole as a system or structure of signs, and of linguistic meaning as a systematic effect of this structure. The basic unit of language is the sign. Signs include words in the narrow sense AND any perceivable item that accomplishes signification or has meaning in any way.
The sign is a unity of two elements:

• The “sound image” or signifier
• The “concept” or the signified.

The signifier is a “psychological imprint” on our senses such as an image or an impression made by the sound of a word. The signified is an idea or thought that is signified. There is no sensory component. A sign requires both of these elements.

Saussure argues that the connection between a particular signifier and its particular signified is arbitrary. There is no link between signifiers and what they signify. The connections are fixed by social convention. Saussure argues that arbitrariness of the connection demonstrates that the whole system of language is based on the social and conventional characters of language.

By speech signifiers become manifest over time in sequences. So a chain of auditory signifiers runs parallel to a chain of signifieds. They are like two sides of the same coin. So, Saussure suggests that language as a whole is a system of pure differences, without positive terms. Each term is defined wholly by the other elements of its own series. So each element has its value only in relation to all the others. Like the value of money, which doesn’t reside in intrinsic properties of the coins, but in a system of exchange, the value or meaning of linguistic elements is determined only by its differential relations to the other elements of the system.

Claude Levi-Strauss

Levi-Strauss used the Saussurian picture of language to understand the systematic structure of kinship relations, systems of gift exchange, and the role of taboos in determining and regulating social behavior. So the total phenomena of language and social life are only comprehensible in terms of the differential structure of the two series of the signifiers and signifieds. The lack of a fixed relation between the two suggests a structurally significant mismatch between them. So, meaning or value of signifiers depends on the systematic effect of their entire structure in its totality rather than being determined by their signified concepts. This means there is a precedence of the signifier over the signified. So, the very possibility of human knowledge depends on the preexistence of a total system of possible signification and it depends on the pre-givenness of that domain’s structure.

He creates a class called floating signifiers. They are expressions of a kind of “semantic function” which  “allows symbolic thinking to operate” despite the contradictions that are inherent in the possibility of significations as such. They do so by marking a kind of “zero symbolic value”. Floating signifiers, by not signifying anything specific, function as a supplementary intrasystematic manifestation. They fill the gap between signifier and signified. They are the signifier of the possibility of signification itself.

Benveniste

Levi-Strauss’s systematic consideration of the totality of signification gave rise to a structurally transformed conception of the nature and role of the speaking subject itself. For Benveniste, personal pronouns such as “I” or “You” have a linguistic function that is categorically different from objective terms whose referents are fixed. In other words, they change meanings. These pronouns have a unique relationship to discourse. They solve the problem of intersubjective communication by making it possible for each individual to express her subjectivity and have a unique place. So these terms are initially “empty” signifiers that are “filled” with a reference whenever they are used. In other words, they convert language from abstract (synchronic) to concrete (diachronic) reality. So language is only possible because each speaker sets themselves up as a subject. And it is only in and through language that a person can constitute themselves as a subject because language alone establishes the concept of “ego” in reality. So it is only through the linguistic existence of a normally “empty” signifier that it is possible for subjects to exist.

Lacan

Lacan’s project is determined by the proposition that the Freudian unconscious is structured like language and so can be read and interpreted in the terms provided by Saussure’s structuralist picture and its subsequent refinements. This led him to distinguish between three registers or orders of psychoanalytic interpretation: the Real, the Imaginary, and the Symbolic.

• The Real
  • Domain of actual, occurring processes and events
  • External to language and independent of it (so it is impossible for humans to conceive of)
• The Imaginary
  • Domain of images and representations
  • Here the ego or self constructs its characteristic aspirations and demands
• The Symbolic
  • Wholly autonomous domain of structure
  • Our necessarily traumatic introduction into it defines our status as speaking subjects and the possibility of any form of relationship to a larger social whole

Lacan argues that the symbolic order has systematic effects that determine psychical reality as a whole. Central to these effects is the specific action of the signifier in relation to the total structure of signification. This action is an insistence of the signifier on the signifying chain so that the signifier effects and organizes psychological phenomena in a way that doesn’t require its capacity to stand for a real object of signification or represent it.

Due to its emptiness, the signifier can only be conceived as the symbol of absence or of the repetition along the signifying chain (This is where it is different from Indra’s Net). This repetition is what Lacan says is the underlying structure of Freud’s repetition automatism–the compulsion to repeat or the inclination to negate everything (the death drive). For Lacan, the basis of all psychological effects that determine the life of the subject are found in the specific actions of the signifier in its relation to the total order of the symbolic, meaning that the symbolic order is the constitutive aspect of the subject. This constitution is understood through the syntax by which the signifier relates to the other signifiers in the whole.

Lacan says that the work of psychoanalysis is determining how the place one occupies as the subject of the signifier is related to the place that one occupies as the subject of the signified. It is the question of whether I am the same self of whom I speak when I speak of myself. And so, the structure of the signifier in its relation to the whole of language is essential to psychoanalysis. For Lacan, what the signifier designates is simply a place or a locus. This place is where the claim of the Other is both heard and experienced. The Other is essentially empty, just as the floating signifiers were in previous thinkers’ work and is key in the role between the One and the Many. The problem of the One for Lacan is a consequence of the structure of signification and its lack of relationship to the signified. The problem is similar as mentioned in prior thinkers, that of the presupposition inherent in the usage of any signifier. But, instead of this leading to the structure’s arbitrariness as Saussure would argue, it leads to a different relationship to the Real than has been previously supposed.

Lacan suggests that “scientific discourse” exhibits these results in the symbolization of mathematics. And so, set theory provides a transformation of what can be said about the One. Formalization allows us to approach the One of any unification and these pure signifiers of mathematics allow us to locate the structure of signification and find its role in allowing access to the Real. Because this has a “meaningless” or “empty” status, lacking any specific relationship to the signified, the formalizations of mathematics can display the structure and can manifest within the Symbolic order of signifiers the being of the Real. With that said, none of this can occur outside of language and the resulting paradoxes show that the formalization of the Symbolic demonstrates the subject’s relationship to being.

Jacques-Alain Miller

Developed the logic of the signifier meant to clarify the relationship of linguistic structure to subjectivity. He argues that thinking of the place of the subject involves a reflexive redoubling. This allows the synchronic structure of language to take on the diachronic movement and organization of life. So, if we suppose that an element turns back on reality and perceives it, reflects on it, and signifies it then it recomposes new laws. Once this element is introduced its actuality becomes experience, the virtuality of the structure becomes an absence, this absence is produced in the order of the structure, the action of the structure comes to be supported by a lack. So the reflexive element itself is identified with the subject. The empty spot in the structure is essential for any signification. (Sort of like how Graham Priest says an object exists in contrast to nothing). This leads to a complex surface that is not situated on the inside and is not relegated to the outside. A visual example is the Mobius strip.

The inside and outside interpenetrate one another and so the position of the subject is undecidable. So Miller shows the One of structure is lacking and inadequate. This is placed in the context of intersubjective relations. There is no longer a simple reciprocity between the two or a reversible relation of one to another.  This is because each other subject is already a representative of the inconsistent totality of language. Miller says that no relation between a subject and another subject, or between a subject and an object can fill up the lack, except in the imaginary formation that sutures it together, only to be found again on the inside. I wonder if this is a critique to or the basis of some of Levinas’s thinking.

Carnap

20th century analytic philosophy began with a break from the conception of language as primarily mimetic, representational, or founded in natural relations of similarity. This led to the critical stances rejecting psychologism (as in Frege and Wittgenstein) and the Vienna Circle’s attempt to replace metaphysics with the logic of science. Livingston suggests that these projects first took the criteriological form of an attempt to trace the limit of language through abstract, logical, and empiricist methods. The methodology was the Vienna Circle’s verificationism. But at the foundation was a constructivism.

So, Carnaps’s aim was to replace the entities that were assumed to exist in empirical sciences with constructions grounded in a unified logical structure that is reducible to the most basic relations. This project was conventionalist as well, attempting to construe these relations as fixed by the linguistic rules of use, the source of which was the conventions of the community. In 1934 he argued that any language is specified by a description of the formal rules for making sequences of signs (formation rules) and with the rules for deriving sign sequences from one another (transformation rules). Both of these sets of rules are formal because they can be specified without referencing the meaning of the terms involved. This leads to the claim that a language is nothing other than a total calculus of conventionally instituted rules. It also lead Carnap to the “principle of tolerance” which says that we have complete liberty with regard to the forms of language. They can be chosen arbitrarily. This conception of the grounding of formal meaning leaves two kinds of analytic work:

1. it makes possible philosophical analysis of actual “natural” languages in order to determine their overall structure and the actual underlying meaning of their terms.
2. it enables the philosopher or logician to propose new or “artificial” languages or language frameworks by laying down the formation and transformation rules.

So, for Carnap, there is no single right or “true” logic of language. The solution to logical question is in the rules. The important thing here is that it separates internal (within-the-system) questions and external (about the absolute, across all systems) questions. He thought that by distinguishing these we could avoid questions without answers and get rid of empty metaphysical questions.

Carnap’s conception of logical analysis consists of comparative consideration of the rules that determine formal meaning within the specifically constructed language framework. These frameworks are conventionally instituted and are arbitrary. Okay so, it seems that Carnap tried to create a meta-system basically that could go across languages and formal systems. We can create whatever so long as we lay out the rules and distinguish between internal and external questions. 

Quine

Quine questioned Carnap’s conventionalist picture of language and developed the thesis of the indeterminacy of radical translation. He thought that the linguists determination of the actual structure of language depended on the discovery of the principles which underlie the language and then accounting for the actual intersubjective use of these terms in language. He thought that the reconstruction of the rules is only justified by the theorist’s claim to exhibit rules that capture, uniquely and sufficiently, the actual facts of linguistic use. Quine showed that Carnap’s two features of the logical structure, which required it to be representable as a whole system and determining the usage of the terms, was incoherent. So, it follows then that we can’t think of any system to be conventionally instituted and that descriptions of the structure of language are necessarily ambiguous.

Quine showed that the entirety of a language’s structure could not have been freely instituted at a single, original founding moment. Why? Because the definition of a new term in an already-existing language can only be a combination of already-existing terms whose meaning is ruled by the existing usage. This introduces a circularity problem into language. The actual usage of something always depends on a preexisting understanding. So, Carnap’s free stipulation of rules without already implicitly presupposing their meaning is impossible. Quine further argues that in the situation of a linguist who is attempting to make sense of an unfamiliar language will inevitably be guided by the structure of the interpreter’s language and the stipulations they make to connect the two languages. So, any “translational” manual for the language as a whole depends on a series of arbitrary decisions that aren’t grounded in the facts themselves. Any translation based on observation of speech behavior or empirically observed stimuli or conditions are systematically indeterminate.

Any type of systematic description of the rules of use for a language, the ways its speakers actually use it, must necessarily be abstracted from the actual usage in some way in order to determine the rules. This means that there is always a gap between any systematic description of language via its rules and the practice or use of the language. And so Quine showed that Carnap’s conventionalist picture is untenable. Livingston warns that Quine’s theories might lead some to posit a naturalistic origin of the structure of language. He suggests that if we don’t portray Quine’s theory as being grounded in conventional agreements or stipulations we might think it is grounded in the naturalistically describable facts of behavior, neurobiology, an evolutionary history. But, Quine’s enthusiasm for naturalism was within the restricted domain of epistemology. The source of Quine’s theory described here isn’t in naturalism, but in the gap that exists between any unique description of the structure of language and the totality of the facts of its use. Quine’s thesis demonstrates the same structural excess that Livingston described earlier in the structuralist pictures of Lacan, Miller, and Benveniste. Livingston argues that the trajectory of development from Carnap to Quine mirrors the structuralist trajectory from Saussure to Lacan to Miller. Livingston then suggests that the critical and political consequences of these sorts of developments within the analytic tradition haven’t been as noticeable as the continental structuralist ones, partially because of the misleading view that analytic philosophy lacks any sort of political motivation or implications.

There is the initial position that sees language as a total syntactic system that says the relationship between signs and their meanings is arbitrary and conventional. This then yields a necessary structural excess of the signifier over the signified which produces a set of paradoxical elements that essentially signify the total system of language within that system itself. It is the fundamental reflexive consideration of the One of language as such that essentially yields the PCO. However, what Livingston will suggest in later chapters is that this runs directly against the contemporary norms of linguistic and cultural plurality and heterogeneity where each local language has its own history. The problem lies in its failure of asking the question of the possibility of its position where this plurality is seen.

Here are the notes for chapter 3.