The Hopeless Trial: A Day in Class Court
Imagine Kafka had written his book from another perspective; imagine Joseph K. was a young lawyer who decided to put the economic system in Prague on trial. It is a shame that Kafka wrote from the neurotic perspective, we've all done something. But going a bit further with this alternative universe, what would a trial of the fundamental crime on which our economies are based look like? Would some form of the assertion of the gap between the ontic and the ontological work severely against any such action? I think so; It seems the grand jury would filter it out, claiming that one needs to be more specific, one needs facts, facts, positive facts.
Courts seem to exist in order to legitimate one crime by prosecuting so many others and obliquely defining that one out of existence. The extraction of surplus value is the unthought of parliamentary legal thinking, it is the founding crime, one committed every day that the law can offer us no protection against, that the law offers protection against us if we ever rose up to stop it. This same structure daily opposes the idea of reparations for slavery. The legal system wants to be able to put one homogeneous entity on trial for a crime, not a heterogeneous multiplicity.
If Josef K. decided to prosecute the unthought crime, he would probably have to do so by defining a homogeneous entity to tack it onto, by giving it some defined ontic content, by selecting an individual capitalist or corporation and suing them. Such a concession would end up with Josef prosecuting some partial object, some individual capitalist as the whole, some corporation as the entire system of domination, this type of displacement would perform an inoculation and allow the system to continue running, possibly stronger than before. You know, picking out a bad apple. This is the case because the courts respect the exnomination of the bourgeoisie as a class, they would not recognize the legitimacy of that name as a designator of a heterogeneous multiplicity. The nomination of the bourgeoisie is a directly political action that strikes at the very foundations of multi-national capitalist society.
However, if a number of such cases were filed coupled with calculated propaganda campaigns the explicate the connection between the partial object and the legal apparatus, there may be some hope. If Josef decides to hit the courts and demand that the charters of certain corporations be revoked, in coordination with some other media articulation like a magazine newspaper or blog, he may have more hope. If he does something like this then the courtroom will be radically opened and the plasticity of the law will overwhelm its other personalities, either that or law will destroy its credibility by sticking to its class background and alienating the masses.
Where do I plug in the....?
Thursday, February 01, 2007
Wednesday, January 31, 2007
Dog Day Afternoon: Cinemality
After watching this film, and looking at some information about it, I learned something very interesting. The film is based on a true story, an actual bank robbery that occurred in Brooklyn New York. It stars Al Pacino as Sonny and the actor who played Fredo in the Godfather as his partner Sal. The interesting part is this; the man who was 'Sonny' in real life planned the robbery while watching The Godfather earlier that day. Where is this film then? What are we looking at? This film is not a depiction of the real world, of a real event, it is not an attempt to reproduce the event, it is a rupture with the event, a movement into the realm of virtuality in the direction of a diagram of a common conflict between established and emergent power.
This film addresses a number of interesting issues. If we choose to read it as a tracing of events that occurred, to be judged by fidelity or promiscuity in relation to the 'facts' we may not see those issues. In order to see these issues we must view this film as a sort of a blueprint. It shows us above all Sonny testing a number of lines of flight within the situation that creates itself around him. He rejects all of them, but he points to them and then he steps back.
Is it a blueprint for a bank-robbery? Let's look at it from this perspective, when we do this we can see first of all that Sonny could use the crowd to overwhelm the police and facilitate his escape, but he does not. He merely incites the crowd by shouting at the police and giving them commands, chanting "Attica" and throwing money. The crowd is visibly on Sonny's side, they are very much incensed at the police and the apparatus of state because of the slaughter at Attica, and for other reasons more particular and personal. The crowd wants Sonny to empty the signifier of the bank robbery into something that they can all identify with, cheering louder and louder when he defies the police; however, he never does this, he even looks upset when the gay rights marchers show up to support him. Sonny knows how to deterritorialize things, but he reterritorializes on his wife, who is brought from bellevue. He does not care about the crowd or about the country, he is robbing the bank because he needs money so that his wife can get a sex change operation, his wife's becoming woman is his focus.
It is a blueprint for dealing with the media? Let's look at it from this perspective. What does Sonny do in his interview? He draws attention to the frame, asking the interviewer how much money he makes, a question the interviewer refuses to answer. He does not allow the media to remain transparent, he acknowledges that he sees himself on the screen. Sonny does not allow the ritual of the interview to be taken for granted, this ritual of making a person talk without letting the person speak. The reporter asks why Sonny is robbing the bank, a question that is fairly obvious, Sonny replies with an obvious answer, money the reporter then attempts to inflict the repressive norms of bourgeois society on him, and by way of this act to interpellate the audience in the name of these values across Sonny's body. Sonny causes this interpellation to break down, Sonny can only get jobs that pay 150 a week how can he support a family on that? "How much money do you make Mr. Reporter?"
After watching this film, and looking at some information about it, I learned something very interesting. The film is based on a true story, an actual bank robbery that occurred in Brooklyn New York. It stars Al Pacino as Sonny and the actor who played Fredo in the Godfather as his partner Sal. The interesting part is this; the man who was 'Sonny' in real life planned the robbery while watching The Godfather earlier that day. Where is this film then? What are we looking at? This film is not a depiction of the real world, of a real event, it is not an attempt to reproduce the event, it is a rupture with the event, a movement into the realm of virtuality in the direction of a diagram of a common conflict between established and emergent power.
This film addresses a number of interesting issues. If we choose to read it as a tracing of events that occurred, to be judged by fidelity or promiscuity in relation to the 'facts' we may not see those issues. In order to see these issues we must view this film as a sort of a blueprint. It shows us above all Sonny testing a number of lines of flight within the situation that creates itself around him. He rejects all of them, but he points to them and then he steps back.
Is it a blueprint for a bank-robbery? Let's look at it from this perspective, when we do this we can see first of all that Sonny could use the crowd to overwhelm the police and facilitate his escape, but he does not. He merely incites the crowd by shouting at the police and giving them commands, chanting "Attica" and throwing money. The crowd is visibly on Sonny's side, they are very much incensed at the police and the apparatus of state because of the slaughter at Attica, and for other reasons more particular and personal. The crowd wants Sonny to empty the signifier of the bank robbery into something that they can all identify with, cheering louder and louder when he defies the police; however, he never does this, he even looks upset when the gay rights marchers show up to support him. Sonny knows how to deterritorialize things, but he reterritorializes on his wife, who is brought from bellevue. He does not care about the crowd or about the country, he is robbing the bank because he needs money so that his wife can get a sex change operation, his wife's becoming woman is his focus.
It is a blueprint for dealing with the media? Let's look at it from this perspective. What does Sonny do in his interview? He draws attention to the frame, asking the interviewer how much money he makes, a question the interviewer refuses to answer. He does not allow the media to remain transparent, he acknowledges that he sees himself on the screen. Sonny does not allow the ritual of the interview to be taken for granted, this ritual of making a person talk without letting the person speak. The reporter asks why Sonny is robbing the bank, a question that is fairly obvious, Sonny replies with an obvious answer, money the reporter then attempts to inflict the repressive norms of bourgeois society on him, and by way of this act to interpellate the audience in the name of these values across Sonny's body. Sonny causes this interpellation to break down, Sonny can only get jobs that pay 150 a week how can he support a family on that? "How much money do you make Mr. Reporter?"
Focus by Arthur Miller: A review
This is an excellent novel about the fascism operative in our daily lives. In addition to being a very good novel in the formal sense, great suspense and characterization, and so on this novel gives us a very useful political portrait of a certain community psychology. Adorno would have really enjoyed this one, perhaps he did. Miller's novel of anti-semitism in 1945 New York is an like Adorno's social research from another angle, pointing to the potential fascism in all of us, and the fact that fascism was not an exclusively German or Italian phenomenon. This is a story of anti-semitism, it is also a story about social anxiety, uniformity and bullying in American social life, in this way it is also more generally a story about belonging in the land of the rugged individual.
This is a novel about belonging. It is an excellent uncovering of the type of sociality that exists in the American suburbs. One may remark that no Christian Front arose to purge the nation of Jewish people and democracy, the soldiers did not come home and join the fascist party to overthrow the government; this remark would be factual, but not honest. If we look at American history, in the immediate postwar period, Miller's prediction is correct in a number of ways. First, the people about whom he writes in this novel, the contours of their sociality formed the basis for the McCarthyist putsch, the surge of right wing populism that has utterly decimated America. Anti-communism, with some downtoning of the anti-semitism, became the Christian Front of the postwar period, the crucial difference is the relation to political institutions, the Christian Front was an extraparliamentary right wing group. McCarthy, Hoover and Nixon that group were an institutional group, they did not overthrow the government, instead they became the government.
Miller is to be commended for setting his novel in the North. It would have been far too easy for him to set up yet another purgative demonization of the southern states as an aberration compared to the sensible and tolerant 'progressive society' yankee north. Yes, the south had a large amount of racism at that time; however, Miller challenges us to also accept the fact that the same thing was going on in the north, albeit in a different way. Barthes would call this an inoculation whereby some reduced form of an evil within the system is admitted in order to justify or excuse a more basic, and more substantial evil. Miller will give us no vaccines against the fascism in the American suburb. He lets us know that it is a sickness, he treats us like adults telling us the frightful diagnosis in full, he tells us that something must be done.
Miller, in this novel shows us a very serious problem, and also opens up a path toward health. What is his suggested course of action? When Newman, the main character, goes to the police in the end of the book he must submit to the nomination of the mob in order to be recognized. The police are also present at the fascist rally. Finklestein tells Newman that the only way the police to intervene in their favor, against the fascist impulse, is if they can bring together a delegation from the community to complain and demand action. However, and this is the crucial point, the community is too intimidated, and the fascists are too well organized for that to be a viable possibility. What is the option that seems plausible? Direct action, if the people who are not fascists meet the fascists as they try to bully and stand toe to toe with their threat of violence, unafraid of busting some heads, the fascist ranks will open up and more people will be willing to oppose them.
This is another reason that we should commend Miller. He is willing to face the fact that sometimes violence in necessary in the political sphere. For too long conservatives and fascistic types have enjoyed a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence which has effectively decapitated the parties and groups struggling for equality and justice. Miller shows the radicalization of two good men, two decent men, overcoming their differences in order to bring into being a community that will not be dominated by fascisizing impulses.
This is an excellent novel about the fascism operative in our daily lives. In addition to being a very good novel in the formal sense, great suspense and characterization, and so on this novel gives us a very useful political portrait of a certain community psychology. Adorno would have really enjoyed this one, perhaps he did. Miller's novel of anti-semitism in 1945 New York is an like Adorno's social research from another angle, pointing to the potential fascism in all of us, and the fact that fascism was not an exclusively German or Italian phenomenon. This is a story of anti-semitism, it is also a story about social anxiety, uniformity and bullying in American social life, in this way it is also more generally a story about belonging in the land of the rugged individual.
This is a novel about belonging. It is an excellent uncovering of the type of sociality that exists in the American suburbs. One may remark that no Christian Front arose to purge the nation of Jewish people and democracy, the soldiers did not come home and join the fascist party to overthrow the government; this remark would be factual, but not honest. If we look at American history, in the immediate postwar period, Miller's prediction is correct in a number of ways. First, the people about whom he writes in this novel, the contours of their sociality formed the basis for the McCarthyist putsch, the surge of right wing populism that has utterly decimated America. Anti-communism, with some downtoning of the anti-semitism, became the Christian Front of the postwar period, the crucial difference is the relation to political institutions, the Christian Front was an extraparliamentary right wing group. McCarthy, Hoover and Nixon that group were an institutional group, they did not overthrow the government, instead they became the government.
Miller is to be commended for setting his novel in the North. It would have been far too easy for him to set up yet another purgative demonization of the southern states as an aberration compared to the sensible and tolerant 'progressive society' yankee north. Yes, the south had a large amount of racism at that time; however, Miller challenges us to also accept the fact that the same thing was going on in the north, albeit in a different way. Barthes would call this an inoculation whereby some reduced form of an evil within the system is admitted in order to justify or excuse a more basic, and more substantial evil. Miller will give us no vaccines against the fascism in the American suburb. He lets us know that it is a sickness, he treats us like adults telling us the frightful diagnosis in full, he tells us that something must be done.
Miller, in this novel shows us a very serious problem, and also opens up a path toward health. What is his suggested course of action? When Newman, the main character, goes to the police in the end of the book he must submit to the nomination of the mob in order to be recognized. The police are also present at the fascist rally. Finklestein tells Newman that the only way the police to intervene in their favor, against the fascist impulse, is if they can bring together a delegation from the community to complain and demand action. However, and this is the crucial point, the community is too intimidated, and the fascists are too well organized for that to be a viable possibility. What is the option that seems plausible? Direct action, if the people who are not fascists meet the fascists as they try to bully and stand toe to toe with their threat of violence, unafraid of busting some heads, the fascist ranks will open up and more people will be willing to oppose them.
This is another reason that we should commend Miller. He is willing to face the fact that sometimes violence in necessary in the political sphere. For too long conservatives and fascistic types have enjoyed a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence which has effectively decapitated the parties and groups struggling for equality and justice. Miller shows the radicalization of two good men, two decent men, overcoming their differences in order to bring into being a community that will not be dominated by fascisizing impulses.
Tuesday, January 30, 2007
A colleague told me recently that he was a writer. I asked him for some more details on this strange position and he informed me about the state of the art. Among other things, he informed me that poetry was dead, dead? I asked in horror, dead he replied in all seriousness. I inquired further, and thankfully he informed me that he meant poetry was dead as a way of making a living, he had been taught that on the first day of the university writing program he had attended. This made alot of sense to me, I had taken writing courses before and was accustomed to the University emphasis on commercially viable writing as the horizon within which a writing program operates as a sort of career training. I was relieved because I thought he meant poetry in a different sense, poetry as in poeisis as Shelley spoke of it, as the creative power, the making power.
Thinking of that conversation, I wrote the following:
His hand reached slowly
the blade
as it struck the earth
to open the grave
birds midsong fell
from the sky
their voices lingering
after them
what has died today?
The sun burned
blue bright and cold
blinding in high towers
mirrors-windows
sound passed through
the world
never pausing to become music
never touching anything
loud as ever but silent
Strange Hybrids these days
lyre and machine gun
lyre and stolen image
sells us strange languages
passed the moltenness of form
singular moment
eternal finishedness
O Death! without shadowfall
full rotten perfections
Cartesian confinement
within striated space
the negative algebra of papamummy
absolutely emptied
hemorrhaging geometries
logics of bone without marrow
efface itself in speech
parades the thousand
names of ex-nomination
Our old lady vivisected
by the marketing dollar
yoked to state speech
as house dissent
quartered by force
steaming horses
o Muse! what have
they done to you?
O disarticuated, Articulations!
my body torn into your shreds!
Maybe not much, but offered, why not?
Thinking of that conversation, I wrote the following:
His hand reached slowly
the blade
as it struck the earth
to open the grave
birds midsong fell
from the sky
their voices lingering
after them
what has died today?
The sun burned
blue bright and cold
blinding in high towers
mirrors-windows
sound passed through
the world
never pausing to become music
never touching anything
loud as ever but silent
Strange Hybrids these days
lyre and machine gun
lyre and stolen image
sells us strange languages
passed the moltenness of form
singular moment
eternal finishedness
O Death! without shadowfall
full rotten perfections
Cartesian confinement
within striated space
the negative algebra of papamummy
absolutely emptied
hemorrhaging geometries
logics of bone without marrow
efface itself in speech
parades the thousand
names of ex-nomination
Our old lady vivisected
by the marketing dollar
yoked to state speech
as house dissent
quartered by force
steaming horses
o Muse! what have
they done to you?
O disarticuated, Articulations!
my body torn into your shreds!
Maybe not much, but offered, why not?
Being a philosopher can get depressing at times, if I practice philosophy (if I engage in fearless thinking) I have to confront many questions, I have to be ruthless in a critique of all that is. In doing this, I chance becoming disheartened, disillusioned, with the most treasured beliefs of my youth. In grasping for the first time the implications of the death of God, having an intimation of this mighty event, of the transience and futility of all forms of refuge from it, I may become nostalgic for ignorance, this nostalgia is resistance to the palpable impossibility of a return, a retreat. Depression comes as the felt futility of nostalgia.
The good thing for us is that we do not have to persist in such states of spiritual reaction. We can recognize that our nostalgia is merely our slavery to the present order in a sublimated form. Once we have abandoned our illusions, once we have peered into all of those dark forbidden corners and musty monastic cells, after we have choked gasped on the abyss between electrons, we come to a realization. This realization saves us from a life of nihilistic negativism, this realization comes as a qualitative change in the image of thought. The goal of thinking is not to establish a perfect representation of what is. The goal of thinking is not to set up a rational theology that can explain the entire would as what it is, neither is it merely to trope the illusions of the established orders and the traditional narratives. In other words, the goal and nature of thinking is not to establish a constant to which life can be reduced, it is something quite different.
As Sartre said, "human life begins on the other side of despair", we all have that dark night of the soul during which we sense the utter bankruptcy of the lies according to which we regulate our daily lives, but it is all to easy to reject them due to representational inadequacy and switch to another permutation of the same fundaments. This is what we must resist, if we do not resist this impulse, this concupiscence, we doom ourselves to a cycle of illusion and nihilism that leaves us by turns manic and miserable always over or undershooting life, always negating whether by means of accusation or false praise. Once we arrive at the moment of nihilism, there is another track open to us, what we must do at that moment is choose the more difficult path; we must reject the image of thought as representation that underlies our illusions about the nature of reality. We must reject the image of thought according to which its goal is truth defined as a stable analog, or picture of reality conceived as a static 'state of affairs'.
Marx once said, "Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it." In these words we can see an opposition between two images of thought; the image according to which thought represents reality, always approaching the receding horizon of a perfect model, and the image according to which thought is something creative, something that intervenes in the world and changes it. It is the move from the first to the second that can help us in the moment of nihilism.
Once we arrive at this moment in our lives, we are faced with another temptation namely, a brute empiricism of pure fact in which we make a grand gesture of abandoning cosmic meaning in favor of the controlled discipline of scientific perception. However, under this fashionable world-view, the residue of the representational image of thought remains, the idea of truth as correspondence between static thought and static being remains though in a sort of rhetorical camouflage. In order to affirm this position, we must persist in that deadly separation of thought and feeling, of thought and life which is one of the most dangerous threats to life because it inevitable leads to thought over life, to the eclipse of life before the symbolic representations thereof.
This ascetic self-sacrifice made by many priests in a white lab coat, and their imitators, by many sober people, many hard-headed empiricists seems quite solemn dignified and meaningful if you are surrounded by it. To sacrifice 'fancy' 'feeling' and these other things that we may have 'order' 'rationality' and other goods seems to be a fair exchange. However, if one is taken out of the environs, as in the dark night we discussed above, it becomes clear that this ascesis is not necessary, and once robbed of its necessity, once it is no longer able to say, that's just how reality is, this world-view seems an odd combination of masochism and silliness. There are many states in which one feels compelled to laugh at these people: their faith in quantification often reveals itself as a trivial form of absurdity. Consider how many behaviors statistical reasoning attributes to the 'average person' at the expense of all 'actual persons' and therein you will see the fanciful character of statistical, quantified and numerical reasoning. When these folks in all their hardheadedness claim to reject anything they cannot touch taste or measure, they seem to forget the absurdity of 'encountering' a number in the world.
Once we have come to the end of our patience with these priests and witch-doctors of science law and truth, we can take a deep breath, relax our bodies and give a great laugh, from the depths of our insides, a cleansing laugh, at the pretenses of these straight jacketed fools, these machine men. This laugh, this euphoria cannot last forever, but it is necessary for us who have been steeped in a culture that takes their hideous babble at face value and trains us to in so many ways. Now, once we have regained ourselves we can move to our positive our joyous task of re-inventing things. We should break the shackles of the idea of the 'present.' This term has 2 major senses, a spatial sense sometimes called 'physical presence' and a temporal sense in which it points to the illusory 'now' which is the negation of the perpetual movement past-future-past. This term has been a major weapon for the old image of thought, and we must be conscious of and suspicious of its incursions into our lives. How might we do this? Well, the answer is quite simple, our philosophy will be oriented not toward documenting 'being' in an eternal present, but our philosophy will be oriented toward the creation of a future. This change is hidden by its obviousness, when we think, when we speak, when we write, it is through a movement into the future, our thought always arrives in the future, and we need only take this seriously in order to come to a new image of thought.
Much has been written against the metaphysics of presence, by Derrida and by many other thinkers. The notion of presence, though it seems like the most simple and self-evident notion in the world depends on some very deep seated metaphysical and moral prejudices. For example, the idea that there is a now that is isolable from all that has gone before and all that will come after is certainly an error. Even as we name the isolable moment it becomes past, even as we examine an object that is in 'immediate physical presence' this examination invokes that which has gone before. There are many examples but for now let these suffice. The larger point is that both of these notions of presence are theological. The theological is that which claims to provide an explanation but refers in the last instance to a command or a tautology as a means of excluding several equally possible alternatives in favor of one. The senses of presence rely on and support inherited formulaic means of speech that have as their most common contents the divinity, and attribute quasi-divine status to any other identity that would fill them. The dominant characteristic of the divinity in this sense, is that which can be said to be all things and no things in equal truth, "God is love, is war,......n" and "God is not the forests, God is not the trees....n". Another example is the self-presence of the subject in Descartes' philosophy, which must in the last instance be guaranteed by God, and is thus a theological concept that founds the legitimacy of a search for certainty, the adequacy of only a single representation, a single answer in his system.
Materialism is that philosophy which does not accept the refuge offered by theological thinking. Materialism is atheological and atheist as well as adeist. Some claim that deism is compatible with materialism, but as can be seen from the philosophy of positivism and other modern day idealisms, materialism is based on fathoming the consequences of the death of God for knowledge, whereas these schools retain a theological concept of knowledge in many respects. The deistic philosophies banish God from day to day life and natural processes, but bring him back at their convenience to establish transcendence. This form of opportunism is denied the materialist who does not even desire 'truth' if truth requires the invocation of a supernatural power to justify itself. Such an invocation is despicable to the materialist, it seems to be less than a confession of ignorance which is at least honest.
Anyone who believes in being believes in God. Or as Nietzsche said, "I am afraid we are not rid of God because we still have faith in grammar." The materialist position affirms becoming, and has a keen sense of the crevices and dark spaces where crouching gods lie in wait. The empty rooms with locked doors, the boarded over attics, the bricked in windows, and sets out to open them to the light. The materialist recognizes that the idea of God can be used to justify anything and thus sees it as untenable. This concept has myriad names, God Allah, Yahweh, Truth, Reason, Experience all of which play the same pernicious role; the reduction of multiplicity and possibility to the command for uniformity and obedience. This same holds true for the distributed Gods, the systems which use concepts that presuppose the existence of a divinity to make them systematic though they deny his name.
The act of naming created two things symbols and Gods. As Nietzsche said the powerful were the namers of things. The story of God giving man the right to name things in the garden, and thus granting retroactive transcendent justification to all the contingent names and categorizations of things in the present is one of the lowest priestly mystifications in history. Man took the right to name, the names were made to stick through violence and terror. Thus, we must see theology with contempt. Whether a theology of God or Reason, or the Concept or whatever. It is the worst form of idolatry, as it distracts attention from the situations in which human action can have a meaning in favor of an immutable plane of untouchable significations. It distracts us from the exploitation and death, the exaltation and joy of life. In the end, theo-idealism lies when it attempts to justify itself in terms of responsibility, it is the historical evasion of responsibility; the history of people denying their responsibility for their social conditions and decisions because these are dictated by "Logic" "Calculations" "Duty" or the "Will of God."
Two philosophers who participate in this a-theologizing stream are Marx and Nietzsche. Both of these thinkers are historical philosophers, they acknowledge becoming or change as the basic principle in a Godless universe. Both of these thinkers attempt to think through the ruthless critique of everything to its limits. They come to some very similar conclusions as to the nature and project of philosophy. Marx and Nietzsche were two of the first thinkers to grasp the consequences of the death of god. They seem to have done so to a greater extent than many of their disciples. It may even be fair to say that philosophy has regressed or stagnated in the current era due to a hard earned misunderstanding or ignorance of the projects and the problems to which these men dedicated themselves.
Each time philosophy overturns an idol it must re-orient itself around said overturning. This results in a new way of addressing the problems of philosophy, and new formulations, new questions, new values new assumptions and new critiques. For example, for Marx and Nietzsche the death of God as a credible reference for philosophical argumentation has many consequences. First, there is no 'beyond' no other world than the material world, ideas derive from material processes in history, not the other way around. Second, and following from the first, transcendence in theory is not tenable, the concepts that derive from material processes are partial, they cannot comprehend, but merely participate in the processes. Concepts do not take us outside of what we address ourselves to and allow for a pure perspective. This only seemed to be the case because God was the guarantor of transcendence, but without God it falls apart, it is much more difficult to attribute this function to the idea unless as a mask of the divinity.
This led to a re-valuation of philosophy, the shift from passive philosophy to active philosophy. In the past, the adequacy of representations of being was guaranteed by revelation from the other world. For Marx, the revelation if placed within history is not direct communication with the divinity, but socially motivated speech that is implicated in the class struggle in the society in which it is manifested. For Nietzsche, revelation is the product of physiological factors combined with power struggles within the society. When we no longer have this guarantee, it does not make sense to continue thoughtlessly in the same beaten paths, but it becomes necessary to re-value philosophy. This revaluation is the shift from passive, reception/elaboration of revelation philosophy to active philosophy. In Nietzsche active philosophy pertains to the evocation strengthening and creation of the overman and in Marx it pertains to the strengthening and creation of a new historical actor called the proletariat. Both of these philosophies are oriented toward a future, toward a possibility that their writing and their acts on the Earth will bring to fruition, or at least advance.
We can call this new image of thought "poeitic philosophy" after the Greek word for making because this philosophy has as its goal the making of a future. This philosophy addresses itself to the becoming future in each person, not to the sense of stability and order, but to the sense of possibility. Thus, it is an open, exuberant and joyful enterprise. This is still philosophy in the sense of a 'friendship' relating to 'knowledge'; only we have switched the focus somewhat, the highest form of knowledge for us is the knowledge of possibility, not the immutable constants extracted from becoming like Plato focused on in his worship of mathematics, not natures and essences as a phenomenologist would have us seek, but something else.
The good thing for us is that we do not have to persist in such states of spiritual reaction. We can recognize that our nostalgia is merely our slavery to the present order in a sublimated form. Once we have abandoned our illusions, once we have peered into all of those dark forbidden corners and musty monastic cells, after we have choked gasped on the abyss between electrons, we come to a realization. This realization saves us from a life of nihilistic negativism, this realization comes as a qualitative change in the image of thought. The goal of thinking is not to establish a perfect representation of what is. The goal of thinking is not to set up a rational theology that can explain the entire would as what it is, neither is it merely to trope the illusions of the established orders and the traditional narratives. In other words, the goal and nature of thinking is not to establish a constant to which life can be reduced, it is something quite different.
As Sartre said, "human life begins on the other side of despair", we all have that dark night of the soul during which we sense the utter bankruptcy of the lies according to which we regulate our daily lives, but it is all to easy to reject them due to representational inadequacy and switch to another permutation of the same fundaments. This is what we must resist, if we do not resist this impulse, this concupiscence, we doom ourselves to a cycle of illusion and nihilism that leaves us by turns manic and miserable always over or undershooting life, always negating whether by means of accusation or false praise. Once we arrive at the moment of nihilism, there is another track open to us, what we must do at that moment is choose the more difficult path; we must reject the image of thought as representation that underlies our illusions about the nature of reality. We must reject the image of thought according to which its goal is truth defined as a stable analog, or picture of reality conceived as a static 'state of affairs'.
Marx once said, "Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it." In these words we can see an opposition between two images of thought; the image according to which thought represents reality, always approaching the receding horizon of a perfect model, and the image according to which thought is something creative, something that intervenes in the world and changes it. It is the move from the first to the second that can help us in the moment of nihilism.
Once we arrive at this moment in our lives, we are faced with another temptation namely, a brute empiricism of pure fact in which we make a grand gesture of abandoning cosmic meaning in favor of the controlled discipline of scientific perception. However, under this fashionable world-view, the residue of the representational image of thought remains, the idea of truth as correspondence between static thought and static being remains though in a sort of rhetorical camouflage. In order to affirm this position, we must persist in that deadly separation of thought and feeling, of thought and life which is one of the most dangerous threats to life because it inevitable leads to thought over life, to the eclipse of life before the symbolic representations thereof.
This ascetic self-sacrifice made by many priests in a white lab coat, and their imitators, by many sober people, many hard-headed empiricists seems quite solemn dignified and meaningful if you are surrounded by it. To sacrifice 'fancy' 'feeling' and these other things that we may have 'order' 'rationality' and other goods seems to be a fair exchange. However, if one is taken out of the environs, as in the dark night we discussed above, it becomes clear that this ascesis is not necessary, and once robbed of its necessity, once it is no longer able to say, that's just how reality is, this world-view seems an odd combination of masochism and silliness. There are many states in which one feels compelled to laugh at these people: their faith in quantification often reveals itself as a trivial form of absurdity. Consider how many behaviors statistical reasoning attributes to the 'average person' at the expense of all 'actual persons' and therein you will see the fanciful character of statistical, quantified and numerical reasoning. When these folks in all their hardheadedness claim to reject anything they cannot touch taste or measure, they seem to forget the absurdity of 'encountering' a number in the world.
Once we have come to the end of our patience with these priests and witch-doctors of science law and truth, we can take a deep breath, relax our bodies and give a great laugh, from the depths of our insides, a cleansing laugh, at the pretenses of these straight jacketed fools, these machine men. This laugh, this euphoria cannot last forever, but it is necessary for us who have been steeped in a culture that takes their hideous babble at face value and trains us to in so many ways. Now, once we have regained ourselves we can move to our positive our joyous task of re-inventing things. We should break the shackles of the idea of the 'present.' This term has 2 major senses, a spatial sense sometimes called 'physical presence' and a temporal sense in which it points to the illusory 'now' which is the negation of the perpetual movement past-future-past. This term has been a major weapon for the old image of thought, and we must be conscious of and suspicious of its incursions into our lives. How might we do this? Well, the answer is quite simple, our philosophy will be oriented not toward documenting 'being' in an eternal present, but our philosophy will be oriented toward the creation of a future. This change is hidden by its obviousness, when we think, when we speak, when we write, it is through a movement into the future, our thought always arrives in the future, and we need only take this seriously in order to come to a new image of thought.
Much has been written against the metaphysics of presence, by Derrida and by many other thinkers. The notion of presence, though it seems like the most simple and self-evident notion in the world depends on some very deep seated metaphysical and moral prejudices. For example, the idea that there is a now that is isolable from all that has gone before and all that will come after is certainly an error. Even as we name the isolable moment it becomes past, even as we examine an object that is in 'immediate physical presence' this examination invokes that which has gone before. There are many examples but for now let these suffice. The larger point is that both of these notions of presence are theological. The theological is that which claims to provide an explanation but refers in the last instance to a command or a tautology as a means of excluding several equally possible alternatives in favor of one. The senses of presence rely on and support inherited formulaic means of speech that have as their most common contents the divinity, and attribute quasi-divine status to any other identity that would fill them. The dominant characteristic of the divinity in this sense, is that which can be said to be all things and no things in equal truth, "God is love, is war,......n" and "God is not the forests, God is not the trees....n". Another example is the self-presence of the subject in Descartes' philosophy, which must in the last instance be guaranteed by God, and is thus a theological concept that founds the legitimacy of a search for certainty, the adequacy of only a single representation, a single answer in his system.
Materialism is that philosophy which does not accept the refuge offered by theological thinking. Materialism is atheological and atheist as well as adeist. Some claim that deism is compatible with materialism, but as can be seen from the philosophy of positivism and other modern day idealisms, materialism is based on fathoming the consequences of the death of God for knowledge, whereas these schools retain a theological concept of knowledge in many respects. The deistic philosophies banish God from day to day life and natural processes, but bring him back at their convenience to establish transcendence. This form of opportunism is denied the materialist who does not even desire 'truth' if truth requires the invocation of a supernatural power to justify itself. Such an invocation is despicable to the materialist, it seems to be less than a confession of ignorance which is at least honest.
Anyone who believes in being believes in God. Or as Nietzsche said, "I am afraid we are not rid of God because we still have faith in grammar." The materialist position affirms becoming, and has a keen sense of the crevices and dark spaces where crouching gods lie in wait. The empty rooms with locked doors, the boarded over attics, the bricked in windows, and sets out to open them to the light. The materialist recognizes that the idea of God can be used to justify anything and thus sees it as untenable. This concept has myriad names, God Allah, Yahweh, Truth, Reason, Experience all of which play the same pernicious role; the reduction of multiplicity and possibility to the command for uniformity and obedience. This same holds true for the distributed Gods, the systems which use concepts that presuppose the existence of a divinity to make them systematic though they deny his name.
The act of naming created two things symbols and Gods. As Nietzsche said the powerful were the namers of things. The story of God giving man the right to name things in the garden, and thus granting retroactive transcendent justification to all the contingent names and categorizations of things in the present is one of the lowest priestly mystifications in history. Man took the right to name, the names were made to stick through violence and terror. Thus, we must see theology with contempt. Whether a theology of God or Reason, or the Concept or whatever. It is the worst form of idolatry, as it distracts attention from the situations in which human action can have a meaning in favor of an immutable plane of untouchable significations. It distracts us from the exploitation and death, the exaltation and joy of life. In the end, theo-idealism lies when it attempts to justify itself in terms of responsibility, it is the historical evasion of responsibility; the history of people denying their responsibility for their social conditions and decisions because these are dictated by "Logic" "Calculations" "Duty" or the "Will of God."
Two philosophers who participate in this a-theologizing stream are Marx and Nietzsche. Both of these thinkers are historical philosophers, they acknowledge becoming or change as the basic principle in a Godless universe. Both of these thinkers attempt to think through the ruthless critique of everything to its limits. They come to some very similar conclusions as to the nature and project of philosophy. Marx and Nietzsche were two of the first thinkers to grasp the consequences of the death of god. They seem to have done so to a greater extent than many of their disciples. It may even be fair to say that philosophy has regressed or stagnated in the current era due to a hard earned misunderstanding or ignorance of the projects and the problems to which these men dedicated themselves.
Each time philosophy overturns an idol it must re-orient itself around said overturning. This results in a new way of addressing the problems of philosophy, and new formulations, new questions, new values new assumptions and new critiques. For example, for Marx and Nietzsche the death of God as a credible reference for philosophical argumentation has many consequences. First, there is no 'beyond' no other world than the material world, ideas derive from material processes in history, not the other way around. Second, and following from the first, transcendence in theory is not tenable, the concepts that derive from material processes are partial, they cannot comprehend, but merely participate in the processes. Concepts do not take us outside of what we address ourselves to and allow for a pure perspective. This only seemed to be the case because God was the guarantor of transcendence, but without God it falls apart, it is much more difficult to attribute this function to the idea unless as a mask of the divinity.
This led to a re-valuation of philosophy, the shift from passive philosophy to active philosophy. In the past, the adequacy of representations of being was guaranteed by revelation from the other world. For Marx, the revelation if placed within history is not direct communication with the divinity, but socially motivated speech that is implicated in the class struggle in the society in which it is manifested. For Nietzsche, revelation is the product of physiological factors combined with power struggles within the society. When we no longer have this guarantee, it does not make sense to continue thoughtlessly in the same beaten paths, but it becomes necessary to re-value philosophy. This revaluation is the shift from passive, reception/elaboration of revelation philosophy to active philosophy. In Nietzsche active philosophy pertains to the evocation strengthening and creation of the overman and in Marx it pertains to the strengthening and creation of a new historical actor called the proletariat. Both of these philosophies are oriented toward a future, toward a possibility that their writing and their acts on the Earth will bring to fruition, or at least advance.
We can call this new image of thought "poeitic philosophy" after the Greek word for making because this philosophy has as its goal the making of a future. This philosophy addresses itself to the becoming future in each person, not to the sense of stability and order, but to the sense of possibility. Thus, it is an open, exuberant and joyful enterprise. This is still philosophy in the sense of a 'friendship' relating to 'knowledge'; only we have switched the focus somewhat, the highest form of knowledge for us is the knowledge of possibility, not the immutable constants extracted from becoming like Plato focused on in his worship of mathematics, not natures and essences as a phenomenologist would have us seek, but something else.
Friday, January 26, 2007
Oliver Sacks, Ideology, and Human Essence: The Horror of Equalisation.
The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, by Oliver Sacks is an incredible book, of the greatest value to all those interested in identity formation, and the constitution of meaning. However, this book's value comes down to one's manner of reading it. Oliver Sacks is not your ordinary scientist, he is well read in existential philosophy and literature. One is as likely to see a thought from Nietzsche as a citation of a journal article. This is very interesting, and contributes a pleasant additional level of meaning to his analytic narratives . Unfortunately, Sacks is committed to a thoroughgoing phenomenological humanism, and this position seriously complicates any attempt to make an interpretation of the value of the case studies in this book. Sacks' project is to place the human subject back at the center of the scientific endeavor, and he includes many cogent and heartfelt critiques of the limitations of mechanism in the neurological tradition. The tragedy of this book is that it is this humanist project itself that is problematic; if he chose to make his critique of mechanism and computerism in favor of some idea of meaning/identity which was an advance on what had been asserted in the humanist metaphysical tradition, then it would be an incredible treat to read his book, one could give oneself to it as one melts into a soft chair on opium. This pleasure is denied us because he falls back into classical humanism.
In the chapter entitled 'A Matter of identity' Sacks discusses a type of behaviour that he calls 'equalisation', after the great neuropsychologist Luria. This way of being horrified Luria, and it also appears in a very negative light for Sacks. Sacks repeatedly uses the term 'de-souled' to refer to this type of patient. Equalisation is not precisely defined in the book, but we can make explicit what is implicit there; equalisation is the effacement of any privileged signifier in the field of meaning constitution. This prospect makes Sacks fear, good humanist essentialist that he is, as much for his own theory of identity as for any consequences it may have for his patients. In this chapter, the patient's name is William, a patient who is possessed of an incredible charisma and an irresistible ability to tell stories, but who also has a severe case of amnesia. Sacks begins to discuss equalisation when William nonchalantly inserts the factual assertion that he sees his brother into one of his confabulatory monologues. William 's tone of voice does not change, he does not react to his brother as something special, but continues in the same way as he was proceeding before he noticed his brother walking past.
Sacks then compares William to another patient, Jimmie G. who, despite his amnesia, maintained a healthy sense of religious reverence/despair that proved that he still had a 'soul.' Jimmie had been utterly absorbed during his visits to the chapel, but, William continued to confabulate and make jokes even there. Sacks goes on to write, "But for William-with his brilliant, brassy surface, the unending joke which he substitutes for the world (which if it covers over a desperation it is a desperation he does not feel); for William with his manifest indifference to relation and reality caught in an unending verbosity, there may be nothing 'redeeming' at all-his confabulations, his apparitions, frantic search for meanings being the ultimate barrier to any meaning.(109)"
William does find his moment of peace, and the respect with which Sacks describes this speaks much for his observational integrity, and true generosity of spirit. He writes, "Our efforts to 're-connect' William fail...[b]ut when we abdicate our efforts, and let him be, he sometimes wanders out into the quiet and undemanding garden which surrounds the Home, and there in his quietness he recovers his own quiet...the presence of plants, a quiet garden, the non-human order, making no social or human demands upon him, allow this identity delirium to relax to subside;(110)" Throughout his section, William is the beneficiary of many traditional transcendentalist attacks on immanence, and we can see here that his moment is an immanent one. However, it is disturbing to see the ardor with which Sacks characterizes William in terms of the non-human, on the one hand it makes sense because he seems to enjoy himself only in those moments in which he is free of human contact, but at the same time it is a brutal type of ostracism by definition that Sacks must perform in order to safeguard the 'human essence', and in that sense it is an outrage.
William is particularly disturbing because he destabilizes the time honored humanist trope of the inner narrative as a guarantor of identity. "If we wish to know about a man, we ask, 'what is his story-his real, inmost story?-for each of us is a singular narrative, which is constructed, continually, unconsciously, by, through, and in us-through our perceptions, our feelings, our thoughts, our actions; and not least, our discourse, our spoken narrations....To be ourselves we must have ourselves-possess, if need be repossess, our life stories...A man needs such a narrative, a continuous inner narrative, to maintain his identity, his self...Deprived of continuity, of a quiet, continuous, inner narrative, he is driven to a sort of narrational frenzy-hence his ceaseless tales, his confabulations, his mythomania.(105-6)" Sacks seems to be very sure of the nature of the we of which he so confidently speaks, and also of the inner nature of the narratives by which the we define our identities. What if it were the case that we have our identities defined for the most part by narratives that do not originate with us but narratives, or semiological co-ordinates imposed from outside that constitute the very idea of interiority within us as a mechanism of power. This is where Sacks' humanism blinds us, it is as though power does not exist at all in this book. What if we defined these aberrations relative to another normality, one which does not take the subject as a self-present given, what if we worked with a post-humanist definition of the situation?
In the next chapter, 'Yes father-Sister' Sacks describes his patient's life-world as follows, "Her world had been voided of feeling and meaning. Nothing any longer felt 'real' (or 'unreal'). Everything was now 'equivalent or 'equal'-the whole world reduced to a facetious insignificance. (112)" Sacks seems to believe that he can make accurate observations, despite his stated horror at the behavior and discourse of this patient, and it seems that he can, it is just the evaluational coloring that is added that can be quite disorienting to one who does not share his value system. He goes on to say, "the world is taken apart, undermined, reduced to anarchy and chaos. There ceases to be any 'center' to the mind, though its formal intellectual powers may be perfectly preserved. The end point of these states is an unfathomable 'silliness', an abyss of superficiality, in which all is ungrounded and afloat and comes apart. (113)" This, especially the last part, can also be read as a re-iteration of the transcendentalist-essentialist critique of immanence; however, it is more to the point to suggest another reading, one that shows the way that Sacks' values permeate his Herculean attempt at observational integrity.
What if we rethink this quotation by questioning a few of its presuppositions. First, is there objectively 'order' present in the world? Is everything grounded, not afloat but together? If we affirm an ontology of becoming, then an affirmative answer to this question is not nearly so clear as Sacks would have us believe. If we affirm the ontology of becoming, then what Sacks refers to is our (ideological) construction of the 'world' in terms of the symbol systems provided by our social groups. These symbol systems are not 'grounded' in anything but themselves, in the eternal 'I said so.' Second, that there is some self-present and immutable center of the mind. This notion of subjectivity has been brought into question by many leading theorists of identity, especially including Freud whom Sacks cites with some frequency. Thus, we can rephrase the quotation as follows:
the humanist construction of the world is taken apart, undermined, reduced in my imagination to its own political devil terms anarchy and chaos. There ceases to be any legitimacy in the humanist definition of human essence according to which there is any
'center' of the mind though its formal intellectual powers may be perfectly preserved...
The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, by Oliver Sacks is an incredible book, of the greatest value to all those interested in identity formation, and the constitution of meaning. However, this book's value comes down to one's manner of reading it. Oliver Sacks is not your ordinary scientist, he is well read in existential philosophy and literature. One is as likely to see a thought from Nietzsche as a citation of a journal article. This is very interesting, and contributes a pleasant additional level of meaning to his analytic narratives . Unfortunately, Sacks is committed to a thoroughgoing phenomenological humanism, and this position seriously complicates any attempt to make an interpretation of the value of the case studies in this book. Sacks' project is to place the human subject back at the center of the scientific endeavor, and he includes many cogent and heartfelt critiques of the limitations of mechanism in the neurological tradition. The tragedy of this book is that it is this humanist project itself that is problematic; if he chose to make his critique of mechanism and computerism in favor of some idea of meaning/identity which was an advance on what had been asserted in the humanist metaphysical tradition, then it would be an incredible treat to read his book, one could give oneself to it as one melts into a soft chair on opium. This pleasure is denied us because he falls back into classical humanism.
In the chapter entitled 'A Matter of identity' Sacks discusses a type of behaviour that he calls 'equalisation', after the great neuropsychologist Luria. This way of being horrified Luria, and it also appears in a very negative light for Sacks. Sacks repeatedly uses the term 'de-souled' to refer to this type of patient. Equalisation is not precisely defined in the book, but we can make explicit what is implicit there; equalisation is the effacement of any privileged signifier in the field of meaning constitution. This prospect makes Sacks fear, good humanist essentialist that he is, as much for his own theory of identity as for any consequences it may have for his patients. In this chapter, the patient's name is William, a patient who is possessed of an incredible charisma and an irresistible ability to tell stories, but who also has a severe case of amnesia. Sacks begins to discuss equalisation when William nonchalantly inserts the factual assertion that he sees his brother into one of his confabulatory monologues. William 's tone of voice does not change, he does not react to his brother as something special, but continues in the same way as he was proceeding before he noticed his brother walking past.
Sacks then compares William to another patient, Jimmie G. who, despite his amnesia, maintained a healthy sense of religious reverence/despair that proved that he still had a 'soul.' Jimmie had been utterly absorbed during his visits to the chapel, but, William continued to confabulate and make jokes even there. Sacks goes on to write, "But for William-with his brilliant, brassy surface, the unending joke which he substitutes for the world (which if it covers over a desperation it is a desperation he does not feel); for William with his manifest indifference to relation and reality caught in an unending verbosity, there may be nothing 'redeeming' at all-his confabulations, his apparitions, frantic search for meanings being the ultimate barrier to any meaning.(109)"
William does find his moment of peace, and the respect with which Sacks describes this speaks much for his observational integrity, and true generosity of spirit. He writes, "Our efforts to 're-connect' William fail...[b]ut when we abdicate our efforts, and let him be, he sometimes wanders out into the quiet and undemanding garden which surrounds the Home, and there in his quietness he recovers his own quiet...the presence of plants, a quiet garden, the non-human order, making no social or human demands upon him, allow this identity delirium to relax to subside;(110)" Throughout his section, William is the beneficiary of many traditional transcendentalist attacks on immanence, and we can see here that his moment is an immanent one. However, it is disturbing to see the ardor with which Sacks characterizes William in terms of the non-human, on the one hand it makes sense because he seems to enjoy himself only in those moments in which he is free of human contact, but at the same time it is a brutal type of ostracism by definition that Sacks must perform in order to safeguard the 'human essence', and in that sense it is an outrage.
William is particularly disturbing because he destabilizes the time honored humanist trope of the inner narrative as a guarantor of identity. "If we wish to know about a man, we ask, 'what is his story-his real, inmost story?-for each of us is a singular narrative, which is constructed, continually, unconsciously, by, through, and in us-through our perceptions, our feelings, our thoughts, our actions; and not least, our discourse, our spoken narrations....To be ourselves we must have ourselves-possess, if need be repossess, our life stories...A man needs such a narrative, a continuous inner narrative, to maintain his identity, his self...Deprived of continuity, of a quiet, continuous, inner narrative, he is driven to a sort of narrational frenzy-hence his ceaseless tales, his confabulations, his mythomania.(105-6)" Sacks seems to be very sure of the nature of the we of which he so confidently speaks, and also of the inner nature of the narratives by which the we define our identities. What if it were the case that we have our identities defined for the most part by narratives that do not originate with us but narratives, or semiological co-ordinates imposed from outside that constitute the very idea of interiority within us as a mechanism of power. This is where Sacks' humanism blinds us, it is as though power does not exist at all in this book. What if we defined these aberrations relative to another normality, one which does not take the subject as a self-present given, what if we worked with a post-humanist definition of the situation?
In the next chapter, 'Yes father-Sister' Sacks describes his patient's life-world as follows, "Her world had been voided of feeling and meaning. Nothing any longer felt 'real' (or 'unreal'). Everything was now 'equivalent or 'equal'-the whole world reduced to a facetious insignificance. (112)" Sacks seems to believe that he can make accurate observations, despite his stated horror at the behavior and discourse of this patient, and it seems that he can, it is just the evaluational coloring that is added that can be quite disorienting to one who does not share his value system. He goes on to say, "the world is taken apart, undermined, reduced to anarchy and chaos. There ceases to be any 'center' to the mind, though its formal intellectual powers may be perfectly preserved. The end point of these states is an unfathomable 'silliness', an abyss of superficiality, in which all is ungrounded and afloat and comes apart. (113)" This, especially the last part, can also be read as a re-iteration of the transcendentalist-essentialist critique of immanence; however, it is more to the point to suggest another reading, one that shows the way that Sacks' values permeate his Herculean attempt at observational integrity.
What if we rethink this quotation by questioning a few of its presuppositions. First, is there objectively 'order' present in the world? Is everything grounded, not afloat but together? If we affirm an ontology of becoming, then an affirmative answer to this question is not nearly so clear as Sacks would have us believe. If we affirm the ontology of becoming, then what Sacks refers to is our (ideological) construction of the 'world' in terms of the symbol systems provided by our social groups. These symbol systems are not 'grounded' in anything but themselves, in the eternal 'I said so.' Second, that there is some self-present and immutable center of the mind. This notion of subjectivity has been brought into question by many leading theorists of identity, especially including Freud whom Sacks cites with some frequency. Thus, we can rephrase the quotation as follows:
the humanist construction of the world is taken apart, undermined, reduced in my imagination to its own political devil terms anarchy and chaos. There ceases to be any legitimacy in the humanist definition of human essence according to which there is any
'center' of the mind though its formal intellectual powers may be perfectly preserved...
Thursday, January 25, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/story/46566/
Noted British bio-philosophe and atheist, Richard Dawkins, in an interview on Alternet, brings up a very disturbing point about modern life, "we've all been brainwashed to respect religious faith and not to criticize it with the same vigor we criticize political and other sorts of opinions that we disagree with." Where does this opinion come from? Where do we find the source of this kind of debilitating and weakening tolerance ?
Answer, Emmanuel Kant! Dawkins does not mention the role that Kant and his philosophy have played in enabling The God Delusion, but the idea that religious beliefs are beyond criticism can be read out of his books. Another philosopher who can be seen to contribute to this sort of thought is Locke. All those who insist on the limitations of the intellect, its inability to establish knowledge in certain domains, and draw from that principle the conclusion that we should be silent about that which we cannot know are suspect. The idea of establishing the limits of reason is a sound one, but the resultant prohibition on leaving the domain of the cognitive is atrocious, vicious ridiculous folly! This is a type of blackmail, we are allowed to use our critical faculties, but only at a price, we are permitted to acknowledge the pretense of religion but only in such a way as to subtly re-ground it beyond reason.
This tradition of blackmail includes those positivists, following Wittgenstein, who claim that, "Of that which one cannot speak, one must be quiet." For what are they doing who obey this injunction? they are not refuting the discourses of fancy and imagination, but enabling those who practice them to do so in a way exempt from reasoned criticism. Dewey blasted the positivists for exactly this error. Philosophy may become a bit messier if one ventures onto this risky ground, but if one does not then philosophy is sterile and totally without interest. It is reduced to the study of the so-called cognitive proposition, in other words, to the study of calculative processes and computation using pre-given symbols.
Noted British bio-philosophe and atheist, Richard Dawkins, in an interview on Alternet, brings up a very disturbing point about modern life, "we've all been brainwashed to respect religious faith and not to criticize it with the same vigor we criticize political and other sorts of opinions that we disagree with." Where does this opinion come from? Where do we find the source of this kind of debilitating and weakening tolerance ?
Answer, Emmanuel Kant! Dawkins does not mention the role that Kant and his philosophy have played in enabling The God Delusion, but the idea that religious beliefs are beyond criticism can be read out of his books. Another philosopher who can be seen to contribute to this sort of thought is Locke. All those who insist on the limitations of the intellect, its inability to establish knowledge in certain domains, and draw from that principle the conclusion that we should be silent about that which we cannot know are suspect. The idea of establishing the limits of reason is a sound one, but the resultant prohibition on leaving the domain of the cognitive is atrocious, vicious ridiculous folly! This is a type of blackmail, we are allowed to use our critical faculties, but only at a price, we are permitted to acknowledge the pretense of religion but only in such a way as to subtly re-ground it beyond reason.
This tradition of blackmail includes those positivists, following Wittgenstein, who claim that, "Of that which one cannot speak, one must be quiet." For what are they doing who obey this injunction? they are not refuting the discourses of fancy and imagination, but enabling those who practice them to do so in a way exempt from reasoned criticism. Dewey blasted the positivists for exactly this error. Philosophy may become a bit messier if one ventures onto this risky ground, but if one does not then philosophy is sterile and totally without interest. It is reduced to the study of the so-called cognitive proposition, in other words, to the study of calculative processes and computation using pre-given symbols.
Friday, January 20, 2006
Here is a song that I composed a while ago.
How many tears must we pay for each truth?
H-ow-ow-ow many times?
How much pain till we’ve been put to the proof?
H-ow-ow-ow many lies?
Walk to the center of the park,
On a day, when the rain is denser
Than any of the structure of feeling,
Prop yourself up against nothing, finding
that you do not fall down below the dirt,
standing into its supporting embrace,
He who was administrator of your
language identity machine, is on strike,
the worship of repetition has ceased
a lightning bolt commands your attention,
but you, bathing the cold rain with laughter,
you hold the secret to depose Olympus:
“heedless emotional egolatry,
authorless histrionics of human sensation,
more dependent on scripts than senses,
worship your programmed spontaneity,
divinize all of your basest vices, but
who has ceased to worship self needs no Gods
Would you kill to create identity?
or use violence to sustain it? would you
kill the world if it upset your sameness?
Would you prefer the willed and artful sleep?
waking sleep, fear and refuge, cover
your hardwired dream of spontaneity.
O! to be free of it, then to just be
To suspend your suspension of disbelief
not to be, be just to, just to, to…"
How many tears must buy each lies truth?
H-ow-ow-ow many times?
How much until we’ve been put to the proof
H-ow-ow-ow many lies?
How many tears must we pay for each truth?
H-ow-ow-ow many times?
How much pain till we’ve been put to the proof?
H-ow-ow-ow many lies?
Walk to the center of the park,
On a day, when the rain is denser
Than any of the structure of feeling,
Prop yourself up against nothing, finding
that you do not fall down below the dirt,
standing into its supporting embrace,
He who was administrator of your
language identity machine, is on strike,
the worship of repetition has ceased
a lightning bolt commands your attention,
but you, bathing the cold rain with laughter,
you hold the secret to depose Olympus:
“heedless emotional egolatry,
authorless histrionics of human sensation,
more dependent on scripts than senses,
worship your programmed spontaneity,
divinize all of your basest vices, but
who has ceased to worship self needs no Gods
Would you kill to create identity?
or use violence to sustain it? would you
kill the world if it upset your sameness?
Would you prefer the willed and artful sleep?
waking sleep, fear and refuge, cover
your hardwired dream of spontaneity.
O! to be free of it, then to just be
To suspend your suspension of disbelief
not to be, be just to, just to, to…"
How many tears must buy each lies truth?
H-ow-ow-ow many times?
How much until we’ve been put to the proof
H-ow-ow-ow many lies?
Thursday, January 19, 2006
This is the first day for this blog. This is meant to be an open forum for critical commentary and artistic commentary on all events and non-events. As such, it is the avowed policy of this blog that all comments are welcome on all topics. I would like to begin to post book reviews on here as well if anyone has anything at all that they would like reviewed please do not be shy, but send it in, if anyone has a written review please do not be shy e-mail it to ecalamia@buffalo.edu and I will post it. Otherwise, enjoy and do not be a stranger but comment.
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