the ninth series: the problematic

There is a passage in Nordentoff’s book, Kierkegaard's Psychology, written in the 1940s, that assures readers that when Kierkegaard writes of experimental psychology, he was not speaking of "the rat cages of the laboratory". This is very true; but it is also, from the perspective of a materialist intellectual history, sadly insufficient. That is, the transposition of a contemporary sense of experimental psychology to Kierkegaard’s texts doesn’t really explain Kierkegaard’s relation to the experiments of his own day – the experiments of Baird, the coiner of the word hypnosis – or the experiments Baird references in his chapter on “Nervous Sleep” (beautiful phrase) that were performed by the royal commission in 1783 to evaluate Mesmer, and that were repeated in 1838 to evaluate the cures of animal magnetism. This is too bad – as Jacqueline Corroy has pointed out in an article on the history of experiment in psychology, there was, from the beginning, a large allowance made in psychology for trickery – for deceiving the ‘subjects’. And since Kierkegaard’s own great psychological experiment with regard to Regina Olson involved deception – one would like to know what, exactly, Kierkegaard could have known of psychology.

Yet, in this post I am going to do something that might pick up that same wild anachronistic strain in interpretation – that is, I am going to use a chapter in Deleuze’s Logic of Sense to make some sense of the image of the experiment, and its relation to the world of made experience that characterized the increasingly industrialized capitalism of the West in the 19th century. The artificial paradise, as I call it, boosting Baudelaire’s title.

So how do I justify this? It seems to me that the encounters staged by philosophy occur on a different level than those staged by, say, psychology. This is not to say that they are, ultimately, independent of context, but they are freer within contexts, they have a greater range. Of course, philosophers think they have the freest range, in which they are much like those chickens whose thighs and breasts are wrapped in plastic and Styrofoam for your discerning shopper – they mistake free range for immortality. They never do know what hit them. But then again, does any of us?

The ninth “series”/chapters in the Logic of Sense is called: of the problematic. Oddly, Goethe’s essay about the experiment doesn’t say very much about problems. It is, rather, as if the scientist, falling out of the natural attitude, is solely concerned with the kind of observation that takes him out of himself, into the world of phenomena, where what a thing is, and how it connects to the totality of what is, does not present itself to him as a problem.

However, where the problem is located plays a similar role in Deleuze’s chapter as where repetition is located played in Kierkegaard. Kierkegaard made notes for a reply to Heiberg, who reviewed Repetition and condescended to point out a few of the author’s mistakes: most notably, that repetition “belongs to the world of natural phenomena, and it is a mistake to transfer it to the world of spirit.” (286) Kierkegaard was irked; on his reading of Heiberg, this distinction isn’t even honored by the critic. On the other side, the problem, as Deleuze points out, has often been said to be a mental construct: “… a long habit of thought which makes us consider the problematic as a subjective category of our knowledge, an empirical moment which only marks the imperfection of our progress (demarche), the sad necessity we lay under to not know in advance, and which disappears in the knowledge we obtain. However the problem is buried by the solution, it nevertheless subsists in the idea which relates it to its conditions, and which organizes the genesis of the solution themselves. Without that idea the solutions wouldn’t make any sense. The problematic is at the same time an objective category of knowledge and a genre of perfectly objective being. « Problématique » qualifies precisely ideal objectivities. Kant was without doubt the first to make of the problematic not a temporary incertitude, but the proper object of the idea, and thus as well an indispensable horizon for everything that eventuates or appears.”

This notion has been extremely liberating for me – in that it is not the unconscious of history I want to blindly fondle, but the problems, the obscurely felt problematic. This confusion about where in the famous ontological divide the problem, or repetition, should be put is not the only reason, however, that I find Deleuze’s chapter pertinent to Kierkegaard.

Get better, Infinite Thought

One of our favorite bloggers, Infinite Thought, is infinitely sick from various medieval maladies that we didn't think still existed. But who knows about Wiltshire? Thurber, of course, had an aunt who contracted Dutch Elm disease and wilted to death - so you can never tell what is waiting to get you!

Anyway, we are posting five songs for Nina's health:

1. Bored - Deftones. Which must be how she is feeling, between bouts of deathgrip pain.

2. Biggie and Lil Kim. Another. I was going to put a Tatu song here, but ... I couldn't find one that worked. Whereas this dialogue is in its own way... What it is.

3. Kapital - Trubetskoy. A cheer you up Marx-y song, what could be better?

4. London Hates You - the Kills

5. And naturally - Here comes sickness - Mud Honey. Which used to go together with intoxication and cars for me - but not any more! I listen to it very quietly and soberly.

Making experience

The experiment as mediator [Vermittler] of object and subject.


Notice, first, the word Vermittler – in an essay written in 1791, when the philosophical language that has come to characterize modern European philosophy, the language that Hegel employs, has not yet made itself irresistibly felt. It is in the egg. Goethe, who was extraordinary at picking up the faintest traces of an intellectual trend, is not so far away, here – the other shore is glimpsed. But still, in this essay Goethe works in the available Enlightenment thematic and uses a recognizably conversational vocabulary, even though he is turning against the Enlightenment idol, Newton, as well as against the reductionism of Enlightenment science. Remember, the Enlightenment was capacious enough to contain Swedenborg and Mesmer. Remember, remember – there is no capturing what the age sets loose.

The essay begins with Goethe’s notion of the natural attitude of Man towards objects [Sache]. Objects either please him or repulse him – on the affective level – or they are useful or dangerous – on the level of interest.

Goethe sees that this natural attitude won’t do for science – which will always bear the marks of its break from the natural attitude. Science is unnatural.

“Those undertake a far more difficult task whose living drive strives to observe the objects of nature in themselves, and in their relation to one another, for the sake of knowledge: for they soon find themselves lacking the measure [Massstab] that could come to their aid when they observe things in relation to themselves. They lack the measure of being pleased or displeased, of attraction and repulsion, of use and injurt; they have to entirely renounce these things, they must seek and investigate as indifferent [gleichgueltige] and even divine beings what is, and not, what pleases.”

Once we have established that the scientific interest, unlike the natural attitude, must dispense with the usual measures of judging and classifying objects, Goethe notices that we have to find a measure for individuating and combining our objects. “The further we advance these observation, the more we combine objects among themselves, the more we practice this observational talent.”

Goethe approaches a problem here that has recently attracted a lot of attention in the sociology of science – namely, how the scientist is shaped. Instead of assuming that the scientist is simply made by the knowledge he accumulates, his institutional credentials, Goethe – preceding Daston and Galison’s account of the epistemic “virtues” in which the scientist as a social figure becomes distinct from the virtuoso, the savant, the enthusiast – distinguishes the “clever” man, who observes and recounts facts, with the more difficult path of the true scientist:

“Only when the observer, even applying this sharp judgment to the testing of secret natural relationships – when he is in a world in which he is equally alone, watching his own steps, guarding himself before any hurried movement, having his goal continually in his eyes, without letting himself slip into the way of some useful or dangerous circumstance all unobserved; when he thus there, where he cannot easily be controlled by someone else, must be his own strictest observer, and must be suspicious of himself in his most enthusiastic: thus everyone may see that this is the case, how strong these requirements are and how little one can hope to wholly fulfill them, whether one applies this to now to oneself or now to others. Yet these obstacles, one might even say this hypothetical impossibility must not keep us from doing our best, and we will at the very least come furthest when we seek to imagine for ourselves a means in general, by which the most notable men have expanded the sciences: when we exactly examine the deviations on which they got lost, and one when after them, often for centuries, squadrons of scholars have followed them, until later experiences for the first time introduced the observer to the right path.”

Goethe’s language here is later picked up by Nietzsche – whose work in the 1880s associates, in high Goethian style, mistrust with the observer, and especially a mistrust derived from the history of the observer’s capacity for falling into Abwege – byways, deviations. This, of course, always presses on experience. Against the deviation, Goethe of course suggests the Versuch – the manufacture of experience. Observation, here, moves from a moment in which, as the scene of observation enlarges to contain the observer, the object of observation is in danger of being lost, to a moment in which the observer, as it were, constructs an experience that allows him or her to disappear. Seemingly.

The experiment is made out of experience, with the intention of being observed. It is here that Goethe joins together the special sociability of the scientific attitude with the especial anonymity of the experiment. In fact, the experiment is, ideally, not only based on its potential repetition, but depends, for its result, on the cleansing of the bias that may inhere in any one observer’s position. Goethe remarks that in his own work on colors and plants he has noticed that friends or companions have often remarked on this or that aspect of a phenomenon that Goethe himself has overlooked. One of the fictions that necessarily accompany the experiment is that some ideal collectivity will observe all aspects of the phenomenon. That collectivity links science with a sort of erasure of authorship:

If, for us, naturally attentive people are so useful, how much more general must the use be when instructed people work hand in hand! Already a science is in itself such a great matter, that it bears many people, even if it cannot support at the same time support one equivalent man. It has been observed, that knowledge, like an enclosed but living water, by and by lifts to a certain level, that the most beautiful discoveries are not made so much through people as through the times; as discoveries of very important things are often discovered by two or more practiced thinkers. If thus we owe so much in this first case to society and our friends, we will in this case be owing even more to the world and the century, and we can in both cases not recognize enough how necessary are communication, aid, memory and contradiction to keep us on the right path and bring us forward.”

Goethe points the contrast here with art – which, in this essay, is treated as a thing that must originate and make itself in the conscious of the artist alone, until it is ready to be presented to the world – and the world’s knocks. This is a contrast Goethe will later retract. I mention it as a hint of the discord that exists between experiment as an aesthetic and as a scientific term.

But to return to made experience: the experiment cannot be wholly squeezed from the time or its attendant spirits; the made intrudes even on its own unmaking. In the crowd of observers, there are those who would connect experiment to experiment without returning to the bosom of experience itself.

I’ll end this with a long quotation:

“The value of an experiment, be it simple or combined, consists mainly in the fact that, under certain conditions, with a known apparatus and with required skill, it can be brought back into existence every time that the conditioning circumstances allow of being reunited. We rightly admire human understanding, when we also only superficially regard the combinations that have been made for this purpose, and observe the machines that have been invented and, we can truly say, are being invented daily.

But as valuable as every experiment, viewed individually, may be, its value is only maintained as long as it can be united and joined with others. But even to join together and unite two experiments, that have some similarities with each other, requires more strictness and attention as can even be demanded from the strictest observer. Two phenomenon can be related one to the other, but yet not so nearly as we believe. Two experiments can seen to follow one another when between them there must still stand a great series in order to bring them into the right connection. One can’t thus emphasize enough, not to conclude too hastily from experiments: then by the transition from experience to judgment, from knowledge to application, it is as in a pass where all the inner enemies of a person lay in wait. Imagination, impatience, hastiness, self-satisfaction, stiffness, thought forms of pre-conceived opinion, comfort, frivolity, fickleness and however the whole squadron with their followers may be called, all lie here in their secure places and will, unseen, overpower the practical worldly man as even the quiet ones, the observer who seems to be secured against all passions.”

Notes on where the hell I am so far

My intent, with this Kierkegaard thread, is to bring forward certain changes in the way boredom is experienced – or articulated, or signified – in the 18th and 19th century. Boredom, which, as we saw in Kant, provides a strange motive when needs are satisfied – boredom, a nameless suffering that would even afflict Adam and Eve in paradise, in as much as Adam and Eve are constituted as human beings save for the knowledge of good and evil. Surely in the artificial paradise, built on the surplus value squeezed out of the industrial system under the reign of capitalism, premised on viewing the world under the sign of substitution, whether of commodities or humans, all in the service of the abolition of the human limit, must, if Kant is right, produce boredom in ever greater amounts. And thus let loose a motive that plays a lesser role in the society of the limited good.

In Kierkegaard’s Repetition, repetition is not linked explicitly to boredom – but to a certain impossibility to repeat. But taking repetition otherwise, taking it in relation to the routines that link one substitution to another in a great invisible code, we have another sense of repetition and its effects altogether.

In this world of motivations that are other than that of need’s perpetual pursuit of satisfaction, of routines that become tedious to the human product caught in their meshes, experiment, which both affirms repetition as the principle of validity and – in the aesthetic stage, to use Kierkegaard’s terms – offers an image of the never-before, takes on a poetic life which escapes the philosophers of science and the critics who use the word trivially. Experiment has somehow escaped, in its nubs, the historian – although surely here is matter for the Gnostic historian, vowed to Marx and the witch, to batten on.

Goethe's essay on experiment

I’ve been thinking about Goethe’s essay about experiment – Der Versuch als Mittler von Objekt und Subjekt – in relation to my recent, dogged circling about Kierkegaard’s ‘experiments’.

Kierkegaard might have read it – it was published in 1790, and then in Goethe’s scientific works – but then again, he might not. Kierkegaard’s mature work is directed against not only Hegel, but also against Goethe – representatives, both, for the system of modernity, with its elimination of the religious ‘stage’, against which Kierkegaard fought.

And yet, Kierkegaard’s very use of the term experiment shows – as he must have known – that he fought from within the net, the vast net of the Great Transformation, the net beneath the Artificial Paradise. Roger Poole quotes a passage in a memoir of Kierkegaard written by his friend, Hans Brochner, who wrote:

“ I once walked through a whole street with him while he explained how one can make psychological studies by so putting oneself en rapport to passer-by[s]. As he explained his theory, he put it into practice with almost everyone we met. There was no one on whom his glance did not make an obvious impression. On the same occasion he surprised me by the easy way he took up a conversation with all sorts of people. In some few talks he picked up an earlier conversation and carried it forward to a point where he could pick it up again as opportunity served.” [167]

Oh, these city walks!

Je vais m'exercer seul à ma fantasque escrime,
Flairant dans tous les coins les hasards de la rime,
Trébuchant sur les mots comme sur les pavés
Heurtant parfois des vers depuis longtemps rêvés.

Further on in his account, Bochner uses the word “experiment” to describe these walks. And here we should recall that the early modern idea of experiment was closely linked to the term, experience. The introduction of observation – of an experience for the sake of experience, like a card game played for the sake of the game – brings us, I think, to the roots of Kierkegaard’s attraction to the word – while at the same time the “experiment” is always ironic, rather than scientific.

In fact, Kierkegaard, in spite of putting Repetition under the sign of the psychological experiment, seems incurious about the category of the scientific.

Goethe, of course, was not. He was, among other things, a scientist, which is why his essay on the experiment is infused with his own experience – and takes up, from the beginning, the deep connection between Versuch (which can also be an Essay) and Erfahrung.

I don’t have time today to do justice to Goethe’s essay. Later.

experiment three

My last post was not meant to show that Kierkegaard was directly influenced by the Mesmerists, or by the use of hypnosis, when he uses the term psychological experiment – although in fact, as he had taken University courses in psychology, he undoubtedly had read something about animal magnetism. But rather I wanted to show links here, chains, connections, intersignes, in which an eighteenth century scene of experiment/seduction is played out on a woman - Puysegur’s patient - who resists him, in the end, allowing him the fetish objects - shoe or bonnet - but nothing more. And I wanted the odd commonality of the fly swatter to stand out - passed from the patient's hand to C.C.'s, chasing after the revolutionary flies of Berlin.

Under the pressure of the observer's gaze, we watch the experiment as a situation under the control of the pseudonym slip out of his hands, and see it appear in Kierkegaard’s hands, where instead of an experiment applied by C.C. to his 'subjects', it is applied to the text itself - the text is an experiment about experiments. And so we have outlined the first problem, the problem of the first page, the problem of the title.

The problem – psychological? Textual? Scientific? then – such is the way of this slippery signifier – seems to slip at this moment, while we are adjusting our glasses, looking at the screen - where we read the text - out of Kierkegaard’s hands too - or out of his control. For what kind of control does our author behind the author have? Why is it that experiment and seduction, experiment and the female, keep finding each other? And not according to the protocols of the manipulated chance in which the experimenter excels, but according to the protocols of nemesis, of fate, of obsession, of luck, it seems. And the experimenter – who is he, and what are his standards? What are his ‘controls”? What is his institutional background?

The institutional background – science, art, religion – is not just a matter of existential stages. Constantine Constantinus, after all, appears so unattached to economic activity, and so, consequently, at leisure to collect cases, a situation that – perhaps – is the reason the young man in Repetition finds him odd – and later on, decides that he is mad. Until, of course, C.C. decides the young man is inexistent. If madness is lack of labor – or if madness is labor that is not socially recognized… And if madness creates situations that are, to the madman’s gaze, experiments, although not so recognized by any others in the social order...

Of course, it is true that this has also happened, in the twentieth century, within institutional psychology. The famous Milgram experiment, for instance, about which one can also ask about its double form – for the participants thought they were in one experiment when they were really in another. They thought they were seeing how much pain a subject could take, when they were really subjects testing how much they would obey an order.

Thus, C.C. is not entirely out of the range of experimenters, eccentric and fictional as he is, eccentric and fictional as they represent themselves. But surely we have seen this psychological experimenter/seducer before, and not as a premonition of our own actuality, but as a figure from the eighteenth century past – for the adventurer develops just such a cold aesthetic objectivity in order to be able to travel between classes and principalities. There is a transformation of types, here, a transubstatantiation – from Don Giovanni to Dupin. C.C. is, in fact, one of those figures that hover around the idea of the detective – that amateur of crime.

How a word will creep into a text. How a word will creep into my ear and down into my heart. All this creeping about.

In the Concept of Anxiety, the psychological observer is described as a sort of actor – or rope dancer. I’ll translate from the German text I have:

“Whoever is concerned in high style with psychology and psychological observation has to take on himself a general human suppleness that puts him in the position to shape his examples right away, and these then have a whole other power of proof, although they don’t possess the appearance of facticity. As the psychological observer must possess a more than rope dancerish nimbleness in order to throw himself imaginatively into people and be able to mimic their attitudes; as his silence in confidential moments must have something seductive and pleasant, so that the disclosed matter can find comfort in this fact, under this artfully brought about inconspicuousness and stillness, and creep out and to unburden itself as in a soliloquy: he must in his soul possess a poetic originality, in order to be able to form all at once, out of that which always presents itself all in pieces and irregularly to the individual, a totality and regularity.”

Two shadows seem to appear to us on the edge of this text. One is Freud – notice how this sketch, which seems to reach out to the psychoanalytic technique of Uebertragen, even denies personhood to the discloser, but instead speaks as though the disclosed were an Es, a thing within the person. The other shadow is given to us by a story that appeared in 1841 on the other side of the Atlantic:

“A certain set of highly ingenious resources are, with the Prefect, a sort of Procrustean bed, to which he forcibly adapts his designs. But he perpetually errs by being too deep or too shallow, for the matter in hand; and many a schoolboy is a better reasoner than he. I knew one about eight years of age, whose success at guessing in the game of 'even and odd' attracted universal admiration. This game is simple, and is played with marbles. One player holds in his hand a number of these toys, and demands of another whether that number is even or odd. If the guess is right, the guesser wins one; if wrong, he loses one. The boy to whom I allude won all the marbles of the school. Of course he had some principle of guessing; and this lay in mere observation and admeasurement of the astuteness of his opponents. For example, an arrant simpleton is his opponent, and, holding up his closed hand, asks, 'are they even or odd?' Our schoolboy replies, 'odd,' and loses; but upon the second trial he wins, for he then says to himself, 'the simpleton had them even upon the first trial, and his amount of cunning is just sufficient to make him have them odd upon the second; I will therefore guess odd;'—he guesses odd, and wins. Now, with a simpleton a degree above the first, he would have reasoned thus: 'This fellow finds that in the first instance I guessed odd, and, in the second, he will propose to himself, upon the first impulse, a simple variation from even to odd, as did the first simpleton; but then a second thought will suggest that this is too simple a variation, and finally he will decide upon putting it even as before. I will therefore guess even;'—he guesses even, and wins. Now this mode of reasoning in the schoolboy, whom his fellows termed 'lucky,'—what, in its last analysis, is it?"
"It is merely," I said, "an identification of the reasoner's intellect with that of his opponent."
"It is," said Dupin; "and, upon inquiring, of the boy by what means he effected the thorough identification in which his success consisted, I received answer as follows: 'When I wish to find out how wise, or how stupid, or how good, or how wicked is any one, or what are his thoughts at the moment, I fashion the expression of my face, as accurately as possible, in accordance with the expression of his, and then wait to see what thoughts or sentiments arise in my mind or heart, as if to match or correspond with the expression.' This response of the schoolboy lies at the bottom of all the spurious profundity which has been attributed to Rochefoucault, to La Bougive, to Machiavelli, and to Campanella."

Carte de la retourne.