Convergence Insufficiency: Emancipatory Thought

(I fear this talk might better be called coherence insufficiency – that is, I am going to be throwing a thin coat over vast areas– so apologies in advance, though ultimately I seem to be arguing for recuperating the notion of insufficiency.)

The proposed title of my talk, is based on a vision disorder (& I wasn’t thinking of Robert Duncan) – a disorder that prevents the unity of representations – so for example we can’t see the thing in itself...  Here’s a definition from Merriam Webster:

Convergence Insufficiency is: "a condition in which your eyes are unable to work together when looking at nearby objects. This condition causes one eye to turn outward instead of inward with the other eye creating double or blurred vision”

The idea of insufficiency arose in reaction to the call for papers – which suggests that the problem or focus (no pun intended) of the conference would be the growing divisiveness –presumably with emphasis on literary society and/or the postwar University. I was suspicious of an implied “liberalism” – a sort of “can’t-we-all-get-along” – in a time where clearly we can’t, [i.e.], we really do need to be able to punch Nazis.  In other words, converging for the sake of converging is synonymous with liberal reformist notions that ultimately work to maintain the status quo.

So my 1^st thought was to talk about problems that activate practitioners in various disciplines, with the presumption that shared problems are how practitioners belong to their discipline. Physicists, for example, owe everything to their problem; they are nothing without their problem.

Isabelle Stengers, who is sometimes labeled a philosopher of science, though she is also involved with emancipatory theory and politics, wants practitioners to work towards converting oppositions into contrasts.  (I’m attracted to Stengers despite the argument (that I also like - using Asad Haider here) that emancipatory politics needs an “unusual conception that doesn’t affirm what already exists…. What the situation dictates is practice bounded thought.” I don’t know that converting oppositions into contrasts can be reduced to a “reformist” label, that is, I think the new contrast or difference generated can actually make a difference, so I can’t give up on Stengers entirely.

Anyway, just as the humanities are particularly vulnerable to privatization and rationalization, they are also more susceptible than the sciences to incompatible “shared” (or constituting) problems.  

The division within specific disciplines of the humanities might relate to a rift between those desiring a truly emancipatory project, and those who do not.  For example, Chris Nealon’s The Matter of Capital proposes (or traces) capitalism as a generative problem in 20^th century American Poetry.

I was going to somewhat hyperbolically suggest that in the current regime of reification, where poets and artists have become entrepreneurs of themselves, there is a rift between those who slip quietly into self-entrepreneurship versus those who go kicking and screaming.

I find this now to be inadequate.  But happily this panel adds ‘divergence’ (to convergence). I suspect that the best way to talk about convergence and divergence is as a dialectic.

There's a pithy definition of “theory” (from Andrew Cole who I’ll talk about in a minute) as "philosophy against itself" – so theory itself is (almost by definition) dialectical.  I’d also say emancipatory thought is a sort of thinking against itself.  This resembles the idea or image I have of myself anyway, and may explain how poems get lost in my scrum piles.  

In Andrew Cole's provocative book The Birth of Theory, there is an opening figure (or image) – from Melville – of the whale’s eyes.  This relates directly to the visual disorder (or blindspot) of Convergence Insufficiency.  Human ears are where the whales’ eyes are. The eyes look in opposite directions and cannot converge. For Cole (who is doing a radical rereading of Hegel as the inventor of ‘theory’ in his inversion of Kant) the whale eyes are an analog of the dialectic which he reads in the medieval sense of the play of identity and difference (rather than the cliché of thesis-antithesis-synthesis, which Cole argues is actually Kant.) 

[I don’t have time to go into this in depth but Cole does some remarkable things, most amazingly he has made Hegel appealing to me – as both presciently Marxist, in historically grounding the critique of the lord /bondsman (aka master/slave) dialectic (in feudal times); and in how he works toward converting the opposition of Deleuze and Hegel into a contrast – based on the reading of H’s dialectic as medieval– in effect D is writing in a style consistent with this…]

We need to find DIFFERENCE in identity and IDENTITY in difference.  It is a play of  convergence & divergence.  There is also a dance of concept and figure.

There is definition of ideology from A Cole that I find quite useful: Ideology designates the inability to conceptualize difference and uneven development. 

A dialectic that works to conceptualize difference and uneven development resists ideology. It resists molecularization – or breaking into pieces, it resists accounting for pieces as if the pieces were all the same.

We do this to ourselves. [So who TF am I to say any of this? I don’t have the answer.] How one identifies as an individual can get in the way of working out a broader definition of the problems that activate "us" in pursuit of emancipatory politics / action.  

Convergence v Divergence also resonates with Lucretius’s clinamen, the unpredictable or random swerve of atoms.  The physics of matter falling from chaos towards turbulent order via the randomness of the swerve is an ontology that (in effect) naturalizes “convergence and divergence.” 

This describes an ontology of materiality – of random deviation as such – that flattens everything into the present, much like the various flavors of so called speculative realism. 

To quickly rehearse arguments against "presentism" (& OOO) -- eg, against flat ontologies & in favor of theories of uneven development – two quick references.

(1^st,) Jordy Rosenberg in an essay Molecularization of Sexuality (& more on this in a minute) critiques speculative realism as onto-primitivism – here’s a quote:

 “The ontological turn is a theoretical primitivism which presents itself as methodological avant-garde.”  (& I should note here my own weakness for avant-garde meth – but I have been in recovery for several years now.)

2^nd, I should mention Ernest Bloch who argues for non-synchronicity - which might be thought of as multi-temporality. The idea that there are many nows.  As commentator Tim Dayton has it: “Every present moment is a tangle of emergent and residual forms.”

Representations of ontology are dangerous precisely because of the flattening that as Franz Fanon says “does not permit” understanding of black or queer life.  Bizarrely, one could also think of this ontology of materiality (of the swerve) as queer, ie, as deviation itself.  (Not as they say a good look.  As A. Galloway says: “Once queer theory is elevated to Being [with a capital B] you’ve got a moral problem.” Better to pursue a queer theory of ontology open to inducing emancipation and which is not hierarchical nor moral (that is, VERSUS a less dialectical Queer Ontology which is more tied to visual representation).

Rosenberg suggests that we should never believe capitalism is ontologically true:  “[N]ever let it be said ... that our consciousness was sheerly molecular, that we truly believed that all the baleful historical foreclosures of capitalism were ontologically true.”  The human is not some fixed creature – it’s more of an errant creature with a high degree of elasticity (or perhaps more accurately, Malabou’s metaphor, plasticity).

If ontology is not thought of as a representation or as a metaphysics, then there could be a queer theory of ontology, (rather than queer ontology per se). From Galloway’s discussion of Rosenberg there are a couple of ways a queer theory of ontology can go.

It can try to maximize heterogeneity-- which is intersectional.  It is an attempt to maximize difference – it is a so-called ‘capacious’ heterogeneity unmarked by homogenous abstractions like the masses or the people. Galloway suggests that this approaches Hardt & Negri’s idea of “multitudes.”  [Identities with as many pinpoints as possible.]

The 2^nd Alternative is minimal heterogeneity -- which is in pursuit of a radical commonality, or an insufficient communal (i.e., as opposed to a focus on radical difference).  In effect this is an argument for a queer communism.  I find this latter very appealing.  An exploration of the insufficiency of identity.  (Which might rhyme with convergence insufficiency)

To quote Jordy Rosenberg: “The collective is that aleatory togetherness of which the ontological-turn dreams”

And I’ll end with a quote from Andrew Cole, the goal might be “to practice thinking outside our age,” outside modernity, to find “a place to be where you can become – in the fight for possession [or] recognition.”