is the word 'diary' better than the word 'blog'? probably not.
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Butcher, Baker, Candlestick Maker… Vs. Thinker.
Butcher, Baker, Candlestick Maker… Vs. Thinker.
At the Levinas conference, two papers were presented, mine and John's. And his and mine were in some ways diametrically opposed, though there were also interesting ways in which we agreed with each other. He wrote a whole paper about something that I admitted in one of my footnotes I was neglecting to give due attention to. I think what he is doing is important even though I think he is wrong about some of the ways in which he is reading Levinas. Is that what I think? Do I think he is WRONG? It is perhaps not so straightforward as all that, but that will do, for now. It is amazing what people can argue about, and get all riled up over, when it comes time to read jargony books really closely over and over again.
Nonetheless, I think what John is arguing is right, and important, even if I can't agree with every point he makes to get to his conclusion. What matters for our purposes is that part of his argument is about where philosophy comes from, and why that matters to political philosophy in particular (it is an argument he gets from Jacques Ranciere, who starts from a Marxist standpoint, and then John renews the argument for his own purposes). The point: philosophy is thought to emerge from the distinction between thinking about "real" things and thinking about "ideal" things. Otherwise put, it arises out of the split between concretion and abstraction.
Ranciere argues that this way of conceiving of the split covers over something important. The real line here is between the thinker and the maker, the philosopher and the artisan. Beginning with Plato, the philosopher claims the ability--and the right--to think about, define, and perhaps derive examples from the artisan. (You know: the carpenter builds table, the philosopher theorizes the Ideal Table in addition to theorizing Ideal Things more important than tables.) Two classes of human beings then form: those who think and those who make, or: those who think and those who are thought about …as if it were so easy to divide human beings into classes and say that one class is characterized by a gift for abstract thought and the other for the production of material goods.
Of course, history has shown that it IS "easy" to divide human beings into classes and then limit or make rigid their possibilities depending on which class they happen to find themselves in (or, at times, which class they select to be a member of). So John's point, via Ranciere, is that philosophy is born of a social and not merely a theoretical distinction. And then: philosophy is complicit in keeping that distinction alive.
(He then uses this to raise the excellent question, "Who are Levinas' poor?" Pursuing that further right now would require so many words that I fear you would all hit snooze before I got to what I think is interesting about this right now, and what I think is interesting is to the side of what the paper was about anyway, so let's just leave it at the conference.)
Almost every form, theory or science devised for looking at the world and judging its divisions preserves the distinction between thinker and maker instead of challenging it. Even the most "revolutionary" discourses tend to do this (this is Ranciere's point, not mine). And yet it is so clearly a piece of horseshit, akin to the idea that reason can operated unbothered by the materiality of the human body.
And so it would be a good idea to introduce the question, over and over again, every time we catch someone making a statement or a judgment based on an assumption that the thinker and the maker are two very different kinds of people, with the work of one being unquestionably more important than the other. Sometimes thinker and maker are one and the same person. Sometimes they are two very similar people. And sometimes they are different, just as often, perhaps, as two "thinkers" or two "makers" are different kinds of people. The question: How did a social value judgment get smuggled into the history of ideas?
Perhaps you want to answer: "How could it not?" Fair enough. So we change the question to this: How could a social value judgment get smuggled into the history of ideas in such a way that it got accepted over and over again as a distinction given by nature rather than as social value judgment? That is our question for the day.
…
I suppose it is exceedingly clear from recent diary entries that I am no carpenter. My latest untold story in this regard could be titled "The Tragedy of the Stripped Screws." My dear friend Eric (a carpenter, builder of furniture and houses, and endless worrier) himself tends to value my work higher than his. At least that is what he always says to me. But he's wrong. It's possible he even knows this already.
2:31 p.m. - September 21, 2004
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