Hume on “an agreeable melancholy”
May 30, 2008
But perhaps I have gone too far in saying, that a cultivated taste for the polite arts extinguishes the passions, and renders us indifferent to those objects, which are so fondly pursued by the rest of mankind. On farther reflection, I find, that it rather improves our sensibility for all the tender and agreeable passions; at the same time that it renders the mind incapable of the rougher and more boisterous emotions.
Ingenuas didicisse fideliter artes,
Emollit mores, nec sinit esse feros.
For this, I think there may be assigned two very natural reasons. In the first place, nothing is so improving to the temper as the study of the beauties, either of poetry, eloquence, music, or painting. They give a certain elegance of sentiment to which the rest of mankind are strangers. The emotions which they excite are soft and tender. They draw off the mind from the hurry of business and interest; cherish reflection; dispose to tranquility; and produce an agreeable melancholy, which, of all dispositions of the mind, is the best suited to love and friendship.
— from “Of the Delicacy of Taste and Passion” in Essays: Moral, Political, and Literary
a note on post-structuralism
May 20, 2008
Based on their varied uses in contemporary critical writing, the terms ‘structuralism’ and ‘post-structuralism’—and, by extension, the theories they attempt to taxonomize—seem to have no clear, stable relation. Perhaps a good deal of the ambiguity stems from contemporary reinterpretations of older uses of the terms, prompted by attempts to manage the proliferation of responses that flourished in response to the foundational linguistic work of de Saussure. Lacan, for example, was hailed as a structuralist during the early stages of structuralism and attacked—and indeed was attacked by—those we now think of as prototypical post-structuralists like Derrida, even though his thought has in contemporary discourse been appropriated mainly by what now calls itself a post-structuralist rather than a structuralist line of thought. This confusion, in fact, ironically exemplifies a problem at the heart of the rift between structuralist theories of meaning and those critical theories which followed in their wake: the problem, that is, of grounding or stabilizing any theoretical analysis or interpretation—whether of the meaning of a movement like ‘structuralism’ (especially when naively insinuated into a binary opposition with ‘post-structuralism’) or of the structure of a cultural institution, be it language or, say (as with Foucault), the prison system. Even where their work diverges in other important aspects, then, what we might call the properly post-structuralist critiques of Derrida, Foucault, and (if to a lesser extent) Lacan alike—while no doubt inheriting the broad orientations of Saussure’s thought and his interest in the mechanisms of abstract signification—scrutinizes, by turns implicit and explicit, the theoretical assumptions embedded in Saussure’s central concept of the sign (as a signifier-signified coupling) and thereby undermines the stability of its component signifier-signified relation.
Post-structuralism, in this broad sense, takes a metaphysical step back from the compelling results of structuralist accounts of meaning to ask what is at stake in what Derrida called in his seminal paper “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences” the very “structurality of structure.” Indeed, we might go so far as to say the hallmark of post-structuralist thought is this very inclination to take a step back from: to reveal as problematic or even illusory our everyday confidences in interpretation. It would be an error, of course, to suggest other modes of thought do not share this inclination—the theoretical dialectics of scientific argument, as one particularly interesting example, relies in part on strong forms of skepticism[1], contrary to popular dogmatic misrepresentations—but then, as Kuhn perhaps showed for the case of science, most paradigms of thought fail to see these forms of skepticism through to their implications for what are assumed to be uncontroversial foundations. The post-structuralist, however—with his debts to Hegel and Nietzsche—delights in this very process of calling into question foundations and grounding assumptions. And perhaps it is exactly this characteristic of post-structuralism that explains why its relationship to structuralism and attendant (self-avowedly) scientific theories like Saussure’s remains so difficult to pin down and make precise: for the clearing away of any such definitive ground for the notion of ‘a theory of post-structuralism’ would belie the post-structuralist’s interest in debunking groundings and therefore would itself become open to critique.
[1] Especially for Popper, who takes seriously the problem of induction, holding that no number of confirming experiments can ever prove a theory true, while just one can prove a theory false. Popper, for what it is worth, is not isolated in his thinking, at least insofar as he was a (controversial) philosopher and not a practicing scientist: Feynman admits a similar view in The Character of Physical Law.
And after a while they will fall to dust and rain;
Or else we will tear them down with impatient hands;
And hew rock out of earth, and build them again.
