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I enjoyed the talk, especially the historical development and the links with Empire and post-modernism. But I have reservations about the formalism (the A = non-A stuff), which seems to me to be both unnecessary and inappropriate in this context. Dialectics seems to me to provide a more compelling route to resolving the contradictions and, in its Marxist version, is one that lies at least partly in our hands.
Thanks for the kind constructive comment, Paddy. Definitely worth debating at longer length. My issue with dialectics is that it aims at a final grandiose synthesis–which seems contradictory since, in a system grounded on contradiction, the end of contradiction is itself contradictory. (That’s unless we round everything up with a leap of faith (like Hegel or Carlyle do), assuming that the final synthesis is in God’s hands.) This mystical leap of faith is exactly what MacDiarmid does at the end of A Drunk Man when realising that his synthetic dream can never be achieved rationally (or poetically) but remains tossed between being and nothingness and heaven and hell. My view is that to solve contradictions we need to escape a dialectical system which absolutises contradiction. Instead, Meillassoux and Garcia’s celebration of absolute possibility seems to me a more promising way out. But there again, in a world of possibility, it is always possible to disagree!
I very much agree that opening up a world of possibilities is a much more attractive proposition, and a far more realistic one, that some grandiose, final synthesis. But I always thought – though I have no great knowledge of any of this, so may well be completely wrong – that Marx’s dialectics sought not a final resolution of all contradictions, but rather moving, spiral-like, onto a new plane where novel contradictions would in turn emerge. What I like about this is the notion of a creative tension – contradictions as providing an impetus for (hopefully positive) change, rather than an impediment to be eliminated. A world free of contradictions would be a dreary, uniform place indeed… In this sense, I suppose I think rather optimistically of the Caledonian antisyzygy as harbouring a transformative potential.
Yes, I’d mostly agree with this, though I think your take on Marx is closer to the neo- or post-Marxist approach than to traditional Marxism (which still definitely envisaged a grand communist world synthesis). Like post-Marxists, I agree that historical contradictions are real–and that tension and conflict can be a useful way to change things! But unlike them, I think that conflictuality isn’t the only (or even the principal) mode of being – and that infinitely many other ways to be, behave, and engage in ethics and politics are possible. That was my attempt in the ‘formal’ bit of the presentation–admitting contradiction but denying its (il)logical pretense to rule everything. There might well be a ‘Caledonian Antisyzygy’ but it doesn’t exhaust all of Scotland’s possibilities, and if conflict might be a vehicle for independence, it needs not to the be-all and end-all of Scotland’s future identity. I hope that’s still enough for my position to rank as a form of heterodox Marxism – which might mean our positions are perhaps closer than they seem.
Indeed, plurality should not necessarily imply any kind of tension requiring resolution, and is of itself desirable.
The geometric metaphor you mentioned in your talk (the circle that is not a circle) brought to mind Apeirogon, the novel by Colum McCann, about the multi-faceted relationship between two people caught up in the Israel-Palestine conflict. An apeirogon being a polygon with a countable infinity of sides, thus indistinguishable from a straight line.
Thanks, Paddy. That’s a brilliant recommendation. I’ve ordered the book! Cheers. P.
Or the evolution of clickbait. ‘Paradox’ and ‘contradiction’ being more attention-grabbing than ‘varied’ or ‘diverse’.
Was the obsession with categorisation of the nebulous particularly colonial, orthodox and propertarian? The world must be owned! Afterlife Apartheid for souls!
Whereas in folklore, something as localised as sibling birth order has much more significance than these airy academic over-generalisations.
It is rather unfair to assumed that the audience agrees (or even temporarily accepts as a given) that ‘Scotland’ is a ‘paradox’. Really all you do is appeal to authority (a fallacy here). Most heinously (c36:30), you conflate logical negation (not) with set non-membership:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complement_(set_theory)
These are completely different things! One means: A is False (not True); the other means: here are all the things not in the set of A.
The British Empire may have shrunk, but it hasn’t collapsed.
There seems to be an assumption that Scottish literature is representative of the people who live in Scotland, but this has to be challenged. I recently read Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and Memory of War (2016) where author Viet Thanh Nguyen criticises this notion, albeit in a different context, talking about literary biases, exclusions, ventriloquisms, privileges, critics and gatekeepers, and so on (the suggestion that cross-generational and other forms of collaboration is interesting in attempting to counter such biases and deficiencies). Apparently French gatekeepers demand a degree of pretentiousness that normal people would not aspire to, and get very angry when people instead choose to write about how horrible their colonialism in Indochina was, and so forth.
In your opinion, ‘Hugh MacDiarmid’ is a great Scottish poet (an application of Thomas Carlyle’s Great Man Theory), but nowadays even if we interpreted that as popularity, we’d have to take into account negative ratings as we do for politicians. And my guess is that it would be a rare poet taught in Scottish comprehensive schools that got overall positive ratings from the Scottish Public. If they’re read very much at all.
The usual philosophical view is that absurdities (logical contradictions) do not exist, otherwise the whole of reason falls apart. So there are no circles which are simultaneously not circles. Any examples which seem to are tricks of language etc. The sophist, not the philosopher, argues that white is black etc. Principle of noncontradiction.
If you want to understand the world, I would not start with any of the authorities you reference. I mean, we’ve got science which should be some help. What was the intent of your talk?
Perhaps we need not be so concerned with all this literary woo-woo, waffle and wank?
Thanks for engaging. Yes, I think you misunderstood the intent of my talk. The ‘conflation of logical negation with set non-membership’ is not mine—it’s the logical flaw I analyse at the heart of Carlyle/MacDiarmid’s imperialist logic. The French philosophers I use to debunk this, at the end of my talk, might not be your favourite flavour (fair enough!) but their position is not foreign to yours. They certainly share your anticolonialism. Like you, I think ‘plurality’ is often a more useful term than contradiction. Where we perhaps differ is that I think true contradictions remain possible at a local (rather than absolute or universal) level. This includes the triangle that’s not a triangle, which isn’t very interesting, admittedly, but remains possible at least as a thought experiment. That’s akin to dialetheism in modern logic https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialetheism
As I hope is clearer now, I’m not a fan of the notion of a Scottish Paradox, which is tied up with the history of British imperialism. But whether we like it or not, it’s at the heart of Scottish literary/cultural theory. That might be ‘airy-fairy’ territory, yet a key tradition of thought when raising the question of Scotland’s identity. And I’d rather face that tradition (in order to depart from it) than ignore it.
@Paul Malgrati, if as you say this ‘Scottish Paradox’ is indeed “at the heart of Scottish literary/cultural theory”, then you have addressed a problem I wasn’t aware of (like a foreign land to me). I’m not sure dialetheism forms part of a reasonable solution, though. If you think literary notions of Scotland are key to the question of Scottish Independence, then I think you have to be concerned about the kinds of elitism I mentioned. As for your presentation, its very appeal to certain academics might seem to confirm the stereotypical rants against the ‘graduate elite’ that the likes of Nazi Steve are keen on.
What I will say, is that the philosophical tradition I was trained in requires rebutting the strongest arguments for some position, if you can (it’s elegant and actually nicer to ignore the weaker arguments). You may have done so. But I think we both know that it is usually lightweights, cranks and sociopaths (etc etc) who defend the British Empire nowadays, if academic reputations are at stake. When I read Alan Lester’s The Truth About Empire, however interesting most of it is, I feel I could be doing something else rather than read more rebuttals of Nigel Biggar. I’m struggling to imagine that poets have a significant role to play in deciding the fate of Scottish Independence. Hopefully, I’m right.
No, I wouldn’t say that Scottish literature, on its own, is key to Scottish independence. That would be overstating its role in the current context. But the so-called “Scottish paradox” is not just a literary topic: it runs through Scottish arts, languages, cinema, and pop culture. It also parallels Scotland’s constitutional history — from Victorian “unionist-nationalism” to today’s devolution paradoxes.
Now, I realise literary theory may sound niche in a country where Scottish literature isn’t widely taught (apart from a handful of university departments). Whether this makes Scottish literature irrelevant or the Scottish government timorous and curriculum developers unimaginative is another debate — though I imagine you can guess where I stand.
I agree that rebutting the strong argument first is a fine strategy. However, in the world of Trump, Putin, and Farage, I am less inclined to agree that imperialism is a trifling matter. Considering recent polls, this issue is still problematic in Scotland too https://www.thenational.scot/politics/24920700.scotlands-role-british-empire-understand/ B Still, as I tried to make clear at the end of the talk, my real adversary isn’t the Empire itself — it’s something more ambient and harder to pin down: a kind of cultural/political melancholy, or even nihilism, that seems to paralyse political and imaginative energy. That mood was palpable in 2014; it may be even stronger today and, I believe, stands in the way of more radical and optimistic developments for Scotland’s future.
As for academic elitism — fair enough. The talk was abstract and pitched to an audience of postgraduate students and colleagues. Every profession has its jargon, and ours is no different. I’d have framed it differently for a broader audience. But even then, while a world governed by abstract thinking, epic poetry, or speculative logic might be unlivable, a world that overlooks or banishes those things altogether strikes me as far worse.