Body and Story: The Ethics and Practice of Theoretical Conflict

In-Conclusion. An Ethics of Theory

I N - C O N C L U S I O N An Ethics of Theory L’ineptie consiste à vouloir conclure. . . . Oui, la bêtise consiste à vouloir conclure. [It would be stupid to try to conclude. . . . Yes, attempting to conclude is moronic.] — FLAUBERT, letter to Louis Bouilhet, 4 September 1850, Correspondance, 1:679–80 Prenez le plus fameux party, il ne sera jamais si seur qu’il ne vous faille, pour le deffendre, attaquer et combatre cent et cent contraires parties. [Consider the most prominent position, it will never be so certain that in order to defend it you will not be obliged to attack and oppose hundreds of contrary ideas.] — MONTAIGNE, ‘‘Apologie de Raimond Sebond,’’ Essais, bk. 2, chap. 12, 561 Au demeurant, qui sera propre à juger de ces différences? [And in the end, what court could properly adjudicate these conflicts?] — MONTAIGNE, ‘‘Apologie de Raimond Sebond,’’ Essais, bk. 2, chap. 12, 678 What is reality? And who are [its] judges . . . ? — WOOLF, ‘‘Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown,’’ 327 My own conviction is that we must maintain two contradictory affirmations at the same time. — DERRIDA, ‘‘Deconstruction and the Other,’’ in Dialogues with Contemporary Continental Thinkers, 113 So Diderot and Derrida disagree about the relationship between language and the ‘‘real world.’’ Then it would appear important to ask which of their models— theEnlightenment-dialecticalorthePostmodernist-deconstructionist—isright. Could they both be right? But this would seem problematic, since the two paradigms seem to cancel each other out. How, then, should we proceed? The puzzle of how to adjudicate between models of the language-referent relationship leads beyond itself to an even more fundamental question which is 196 Body and Story my concern in this counter-conclusory conclusion. My question is this: what and how should we think when discrepant theories appear irreconcilable? How should we understand, and how practice ‘‘theory’’ in a world of seemingly endless difference and disagreement? People have thought about these questions before. I want to consider some strains of this reflection—particularly a long tradition of philosophical skepticism which has not been much attended to today, and modern versions of it such as Niels Bohr’s theory of complementarity. The fundamental problem is to think about the epistemological and ethical resonances of the phenomenon of contention itself—exemplified for many of us in the interpretive disciplines by the ‘‘theory wars’’ that in recent decades have focused so much energy and spilled so much ink. The purpose of such reflection is not to conclude which side is the right one but to deepen understanding of the ubiquity of ‘‘sides’’ to begin with. The problem of conflicting positions has always been difficult. But today the world seems to mass-produce contention, to be rife with division. Agon has become quotidian and omnipresent. Even beyond traditional elites in the North and West, the competition for increased market share on the bourse of intellectual capital and the cultural and individual profits that attend such increase have grown considerably. This matters. Today globalization has made more voices consequential; technology has made them more audible; and the politics of a world of unequal resources and discrepant life chances has made them more contentious. This is the world in which we live. But what could be the meaning of a world in which contention is everywhere? In thinking about this question, I want to start out from two perceptions: that the world is alive with diversity and with potentials; and that ideas constantly clash. These twin recognitions about how understanding intersects with existence provide a basis for thinking about theory itself. We have long and almost uninterrupted experience with paradigmatic contention . Such conflict seems to be the normal state—the history—of intellectual and cultural discourse. The content of these controversies varies, but their form remains surprisingly regular. From the pre-Socratic argument between Parmenides ’ doctrine that existence is unchanging and Heraclitus’ contrary vision of the world as unceasing flux; to the medieval disputation between realists and nominalists; to ‘‘creationist’’ versus ‘‘evolutionist’’ arguments between figures such as Huxley and Wilberforce in the nineteenth century; or (later but still In-Conclusion 197 within the philosophy of biology) to conflicts between ‘‘mechanists’’ and ‘‘teleologists ’’ over the causal foundations of Darwinian theory—but a list of such contentions could go on for pages. Such superfluity of examples is my point. I believe the question we need to ask about it is, what...