One way to read contemporary philosophy of religion and philosophical 
     theology is to view it as a series of attempts to determine how God
     became a problem in the West. . . .Their arguments already seem to be
     part of a high modernity which has been deconstructed by end-of-
     ontotheology arguments which claim that the only appropriate
     language for God in the postmodern context is no, not, never.**

Anthony Godzieba (Associate Professor, Villanova University) ought to be ashamed of himself!  

I know how God became a problem in the West. 

God finally—after trying for millennia—became a problem in the West (dare I assume speaking  for myself is speaking for “the West?”) in a 1400-square-foot apartment on a street—lined with live oak trees so old they spread a canopy over the street for neighbors to walk their dogs, the Asian-American medical students’ families to meet and talk and the gay melting-pot Americans to meet to plan rendezvous—in Dallas, Texas, United States, North America, the West, Earth. 

A canopy of (graitude?)

“For health and strength and daily bread, we give you thanks, O Lord.” Two-part, incipit an ascending octave leap on the dominant, the melody descending through the scale omitting the seventh. (I can write in the technical jargon of my discipline.) I have no idea when I first sang this as a blessing before a meal. 

The simple round is the gist of the Thanksgiving Eve sermon by the Rector of a large, wealthy, Episcopal parish in Dallas about the nature and need for Thanksgiving, We are to be grateful for what we have been given (presumably by God). 

The service was deeply moving, the “Noise of Solemn Assemblies” *** at its finest. The organ music was delicious. The choir sang Maurice Green’s “Thou Visiteth the Earth.” We sang the Thanksgiving hymns one might expect. I am emotionally and spiritually (?) engaged in services at this church (until the Creed when I either choke in grief or am enraged, and unable to say the words).  

All but the Credo

God became a problem not when Nietzsche announced his death (Nietzsche was myopic—he killed off only the Western god). God became a problem not with Heidegger’s convolutions; not with Kierkegaard’s grief—although that was close; not with Foucault’s Religion and Culture; not with Niebuhr, Faigley, Frankl, or Lyotard. Perhaps God became a problem with Baudrillard. 

God became a problem (and becomes a problem) each time a person (and then another, and another) discovers that the “metanarrative” (words invented by people in the above list are a problem) we have learned to be true (or we have assumed from infancy) is not. Life is not civilization, or theology, or good works, sociology, politics, love, hate, education, the economy, automobiles, wars in Iraq, or health care reform. And life is not “God.” 

God has worked up to being a problem for millennia. God tries to garner attention. God will, in fact, allow peoples’ lives to come unhinged, to be disasters, miserable, or intolerable. Or God will allow people to be happy, joyous, and free, to be billionaires, to have the power of the Presidency, to celebrate Thanksgiving in style and ease, and luxury. God allows these things (don’t go criticizing my theology—I don’t give a fig about theology; I report the facts as I see them) in order, now and then, to get one person’s attention. Each one who comes to the understanding that God is a problem has to do so alone. 

Discovering that the metanarrative, whatever version of it one has come to believe, is not true is one’s discovery that God is a problem. I can claim to have discovered this for the “West” in my apartment because, for me, the discovery is universal—it shakes my universe, so it must shake THE universe. And once discovered, the problem is never undiscovered. 

Discovering God is a problem means everything else is a problem. “For health and strength and daily bread, we give you thanks, O Lord” is meaningless (or at least problematic). Why give thanks for something that does not exist. God is a problem for me because I for so long had all of my hope, my comfort, my understanding of reality bound up with God.  

My grateful admission that God is a problem does not mean I have concluded God does not exist. How would I know? It means simply that, this Thanksgiving Day I cannot trust the metanarrative, what Wikipedia (Hah! laugh at my scholarship) calls the “abstract idea that is thought to be a comprehensive explanation of historical experience or knowledge.”  

I’m not throwing my lot in with Lyotard (although his work is clever) and the other “post-modernists.” They wrangle over metanarratives as surely as the ancient theologians who asked how many angels danced on the head of your hatpin. 

I don’t think about abstractions that explain history or knowledge. When my friends read philosophy in college and thought deep thoughts, I was learning organ music. I was drunk. I was trying to find sexual bliss. I read (and tried to write) novels. I can’t participate in discussions of Lyotard and Foucault (Foucault may have discovered that God is a problem). 

I grieve God as a problem. I am grateful for it. I assume that, if I live long enough (“what is life” is the first question one asks when one discovers that God is a problem), I may find some grace in the discovery. 

I do not want to over-emphasize the ways in which my body (mostly my brain) works differently than most human bodies. My twin disorders, Temporal Lobe Epilepsy and Bipolar Disorder, are perhaps not disorders at all. Perhaps they are the true gifts for which I celebrate Thanksgiving. They have forced me to understand God is a problem. Nothing is what it seems. Nothing is real. If reality is impossible to define, nothing survives when our bodies no longer participate in life on Earth. I am ill (but isn’t everyone?). One of my “illnesses” consists in a misfiring of brain cells that causes me dissociation, the physical beginning of my intellectual understanding that God is [unreal] a problem. 

Lately, I have been comforted, when I am overwhelmed knowing God is a problem, by the writings of Arthur Frank which I discovered in an article by Cristina Rocha. 

In The Wounded Storyteller, Arthur Frank argues that people use illness narratives ‘to repair the damage that illness has done to the ill person’s sense of where she is in life, and where she maybe going.’ He identifies three kinds of narratives—restitution, chaos, and quest. . . .Finally, in the quest narrative, ‘illness is the occasion of a journey that becomes a quest.’ The ill person has an active role in it, as s/he finds a sense of purpose in the illness, and uses it to undergo transformation. **** 

Thanksgiving Day is a day for me to remember my gratitude that God is a problem for me. I am grateful to be on a quest.

** Godzieba, Anthony J. ”Ontotheology to excess: imagining God without being. ” Theological Studies. 56.1 (March 1995): 3(18).  Associate Professor, Villanova University; Editor of Horizons, the journal of the College Theology Society.
*** Berger, Peter. The Noise of Solemn Assemblies; Christian Commitment and the Religious Establishment in America. New York: Doubleday, 1961. “Mainline Protestantism has always been in a symbiotic relationship with the middle-class culture, which is to a large extent its own historical product (after all, it is this type of Protestantism that has been a crucially important factor in the formation of American bourgeois civilization) and that continues to be its social context [in which people do not know God is a problem].”
**** Rocha, Cristina. ”Seeking healing transnationally: Australians, John of God and Brazilian Spiritism. ” The Australian Journal of Anthropology  20.2 (August 2009): 229(18).  Cristina Rocha is a staff member at the Centre for Cultural Research, University of Western Sydney.

We Plow the Fields and Scatter

Hola, a tots.

Us recordo breument que la nostra propera trobada serà el 19 de desembre de 2009. Una setmana abans del Nadal. Esperem que això no provoqui gaires absències.

L’autor triat és Lyotard i els textos els podeu baixar al següent vincle:

Selecció http://www.gep21.org/tpk/lyotard-selec.pdf

Es tracta d’un PDF que pesa 11 Mb. Una mica de paciència.

Per aquesta trobada contarem amb la participació d’Alexander Nunes de Oliveira. Un company del GEP21. Ell portarà la direcció d’aquest dia i per tant, si algú vol participar a la lectura i presentació dels articles seleccionats, es pot posar en contacte amb ell a l’adreça de sempre: marcel-duchamp@hotmail.com que l’Alexandre tot seguit us contestarà.

També us recordo que el dissabte, 16 de gener de 2010 serà el torn de Rosalind Kraus (PDF 8 MB)

Podeu baixar la selecció http://www.gep21.org/tpk/krauss-selec.pdf

The critique of the critique of critique, like the old man in the sphynx’s riddle, is left, in the end, with only one leg on which to stand. Still kritizierbar is this alone — the myth of a heroic beginnings, of grand gestures, of new vistas, new worlds of thought, that might appear (ah… Baltimore… 1966) in a conference paper, written in a mere 10 days.   Master thinkers, and their disciples. A playfulness that was serious.  Now our seriousness is stillborn in its seriousness.

Against the sweet insouciance of Friends, there is something terrifying about this sitcom, which is marketed in Korea under the title: “I love Friends.” As if Friends, and the friend, had already become the object of a pathetic longing. As if, even in this, we must resign ourselves to an Ersatz-friends. With a macabre instinct, someone recognized that the great joke of Seinfeld, the fake cast, had suddenly been recast as a real sitcom.  As if there were a third repetition in history, beyond tragedy and farce.

But this third brings us back to the first: the husband, an architect like Mr. Brady, tells his children how he met their mother.  The purest form of the tyranny of mythopoesis.  As if the children could, or should care.  As if the very idea that they should care, that the mystery of their birth could be reduced to an endless sequence of tawdry vignettes, were not the most terrible offence against childhood. As if the novelty of birth could be seamlessly folded into the life of the parents.

What did Oedipus and Antigone talk about during their long years of wandering?

All myth, every beginning, is perverse.  This silliest of sitcoms brings us to the brink of tragic, Dionysian knowledge. The parents who entertain their child with the story of their prehistoric misadventures demand that the child replicate their own desire for life — without having lived.  They seek nothing less than the confirmation of their own desire for life in the lifeless desire of their children.  This is the prosaic, everyday form of mythic incest. And the tyranny of desire is always this: the desire for obsolete forms of desire.

We who watch are like the children who listen.  We do not live, but we desire to live.  And we late-born theorists (we theorists after theory…) are, in this, not so different than the couch potato. (Hence the critique of television is not the least bit irrelevant for proto philosophia) We do not think, but we desire to think.  We desire the form that thinking once took in its still fresh, but wholly mythic past.  We cannot imagine happiness but in a form that is no longer possible for us. True happiness for us is whatever happiness we cannot have.

The genius of Tristram Shandy suddenly dawns on me:  the sobriety of prose begins with the parody of the myth of our own drunken birth.

I was born then, in 1966, and before this: in Weimar, in Vienna, in Berlin, in Prague, in Jena, in Paris, in Florence, in Rome, and Athens. And also in places far from the cities.  Why do I then feel so melancholy as I read this book by François Cusset:  am I nothing simply because I was not there to watch my birth. Is there greatness only in beginnings?   But hasn’t philosophy, which has created so much from a single matter, always been the next best thing.

Este libro -Lyotard: La condición posmoderna- es uno de los materiales que tenemos que destripar para el próximo chat de la asignatura Principios de la Sociedad del Conocimiento, que será el 2 de Diciembre a las 19.30.

El realismo es el arte de hacer la realidad, de saber la realidad y de hacer la realidad. La historia que acabamos de escuchar dice que, más tarde, ese arte se desarrollará aún más. La realidad quedará distinta. Hacer, saber y saber hacer quedarán distintos. Entre lo que somos y lo que será el héroe del éxodo final, la realidad y el arte de la realidad habrán terminado casi tan metamorfoseados como antaño, desde las amebas hasta llegar a nosotros. la fábula es realista porque narra la historia de una fuerza que hace, deshace y rehace la realidad. También es realista porque toma nota  del hecho que esta fuerza  ya ha transformado la realidad y el arte que, salvo una catástrofe, esta transformación debe continuarse. De nuevo es realista cuando admite como obstáculo inevitable para la consecución de la transformación el fin del sistema solar. Finalmente ¿es realista cuando predice que el obstáculo se superará y la fuerza escapará al desastre?

La fábula cuenta la historia de un conflicto entre dos procesos relativos a la energía. Uno lleva a la destrucción  de todos los sistemas, cuerpo vivos o no, que existen en el planeta Tierra y en el sistema solar. Dentro de este proceso entrópico, contingente y discontinuo, al menos durante mucho tiempo, actúa en sentido inverso mediante la diferenciación  creciente de los sistemas. Este último movimiento no puede detener al primero (a menos que se encuentre la forma de abastecer de carburante al Sol), pero puede sustraerse a la catástrofe abandonando su paraje cósmico, el sistema solar.

En la Tierra como en otro lugar, la entropía dirige la energía hacia el estado más probable, una especie de sopa corpuscular, un caos frío. Por el contrario, la entropía negativa la combina en sistemas diferenciados, más complejos, como decimos, más desarrollados. El desarrollo no es una invención de los Humanos. Los Humanos son una invención del desarrollo. El héroe de la fábula no es la especia humana, sino la energía. La fábula narra una sucesión de episodios donde se destaca el éxito, ora del más probable, la muerte, ora del más improbable, del más precario, siendo también más eficiente, el complejo. Es una tragedia de la energía. Como Edipo rey, acaba mal. Como Edipo en Colona, admite una última remisión.

El héroe no es un sujeto. La palabra energía no dice nada, salvo que hay fuerza. Lo que le sucede a la energía, formación de sistemas, su muerte o supervivencia, aparición de sistemas más diferenciados, de todo esto la energía no sabe nada y nada quiere. Obedece a unas leyes ciegas, locales y a la casualidad.

La especie humana no es el héroe de la fábula. Es una forma compleja de organización de la energía. Como las demás formas, sin duda es transitoria. Otras formas pueden aparecer, más complejas y la superarán. Tal vez sea una de esas formas la que se esté preparando mediante el desarrollo tecno-científico desde que se empezó a contar la fábula. Razón por la cual la fábula no puede empezar a identificar el sistema que será el héroe del exilio. Tan sólo puede predecir que el héroe, si consigue escapar de la destrucción del sistema solar tendrá que ser más complejo que lo que fue la especie humana en el momento en que se cuenta la fábula, aunque sea la or ganización de energía más compleja conocida del Universo.

Tendrá que ser más compleja, ya que tendrá que sobrevivir a la destrucción del contexto terrestre. No bastará con que un organismo vivo en simbiosis con energías específicas que encuentre en la Tierra, es decir, el cuerpo humano, siga alimentando al sistema y concretamente al cerebro. Tendrá que poder utilizar directamente las únicas formas de energía física disponibles en el cosmos, las partículas sin preorganización previa. Por eso la fábula deja entrever que el héroe del éxodo, destinado a sobrevivir a la destrucción de la vida terrestre, no será un simple sobreviviente, ya que no estará vivo en el sentido que le damos a la palabra.

Esta condición es necesaria, pero en el momento en que se cuenta esta fábula, nadie puede decir cómo se cumplirá. Hay incertidumbre en esta historia porque la energía negativa actúa de manera contingente y la aparición de los sistemas más complejos –a pesar de las investigaciones y controles en sí mismos sistemáticos– resulta imprevisible. Se puede facilitar esta aparición, pero no ordenarla. Un rasgo de los sistemas abiertos que la fábula llama <<liberales democráticos>> es el de dejar abiertos espacios de incertidumbre propios para facilitar la aparición de organizaciones más complejas y así en todos los campos. Lo que llamamos ahora investigación es un caso ahora trivial de esos espacios libres para inventar y descubrir. En sí este caso es el signo de un desarrollo superior, en el que la necesidad y el azar se combinan no sólo en el orden epistemológico, como senaló Monod, sino en la realidad de una nueva alianza, de acuerdo con los términos de Prigogine y Stengers. Esta alianza no es la de lo objetivo y lo subjetivo, sino la de la regla y el azar, o de la consecución y la discontinuidad.

Si no existieran estas regiones de incertidumbre en la historia de la energía, incluso la fábula que cuenta esta historia no sería posible. Porque una fábula es una organización de lenguaje, y éste es un estado complejísimo de la energía, un mecanismo técnico simbólico. Ahora bien, la inventiva requiere para desplegarse una especie de vacante espacio-temporal y material, donde la energía del lenguaje no se confiera en las obligaciones directas de la explotación del hacer, saber y saber hacer.

En la fábula, la energía del lenguaje se consume en imaginar. Luego fabrica una realidad, la de la historia que cuenta, pero el uso cognitivo y técnico de esta realidad queda en suspenso. Se la explota reflexivamente, es decir, se la envía de nuevo al lenguaje para que éste concatene a su vez (lo que estoy haciendo). Esta suspensión diferencia lo poético de lo práctico y de lo pragmático.  La invención mantiene a la realidad en reserva y apartada de la explotación  dentro del sistema. Esta realidad se llama imaginario. La existencia de realidades imaginarias presupone, en el sistema en el que aparece, unas zonas, por decirlo de algún modo, neutrales con relación a las obligaciones simplemente realistas de los resultados de dicho sistema. Algunos sistemas rígidos como el arco reflejo o incluso un programa instintivo (por tomar ejemplos de lo vivo que conocemos) prohiben a las amebas, a los sicomoros y a las anguilas que inventen, por regla general.

El realismo acepta y hasta exige la presencia de lo imaginario en él y que éste, nada más lejos que un ser extraño, sea un estado de la realidad, el estado naciente. La ciencia y la técnica incluso no inventan menos, no son menos poéticos que la pintura, la literatura o el cine. La única diferencia entre unos y otros reside en el apremio verificación/falsificación de la hipótesis. La fábula es una hipótesis  que se sustrae de esta obligación.

La fábula que hemos escuchado no es reciente ni original. Pero la supongo posmoderna. Posmoderna no significa reciente. Significa cómo la escritura, en el sentido más amplio del pensamiento y de la acción, se sitúa tras padecer el contagio de la modernidad y del que ha intentado curarse. Sin embargo, la modernidad tampoco es reciente. Ni siquiera es una época. Es otro estado de la escritura, en sentido amplio.

Podemos ver surgir los primeros rasgos de la modernidad en el trabajo realizado por Pablo de Tarso (el apóstol), y por Agustín para adaptar la tradición clásica pagana y la escatología cristiana. Un elemento distintivo del imaginario moderno lo constituye la historicidad, ausente del imaginario antiguo. Los modernos subordinan al despliegue del tiempo histórico la legitimación  del sujeto colectivo llamado Europa u Occidente. Con Herodoto y Tucídides, Tito Livio y Tácito, los Antiguos inventaron la historia y la opusieron al mito y a la epopeya, otros géneros narrativos. Y por otra parte, junto con Aristóteles, elaboraron el concepto de telos, de fin como perfección y el pensamiento teleológico. Pero será el cristianismo pensado de nuevo por Pablo y Agustín el que introduzca en el corazón del pensamiento occidental la escatología propiamente dicha, que dirigirá al imaginario moderno de la historicidad. La escatología narra la experiencia de un sujeto afectado por una falta y profetiza que esta experiencia acabará en los confines de los tiempos con la remisión del mal, la destrucción de la muerte y la vuelta al hogar del padre, es decir, con pleno significado.

La esperanza cristiana ligada a esta escatología se refunde en la racionalidad nacida del clasicismo pagano. Esperar pasa a ser razonable. Y reciprocamente, la razón griega se transforma. Ya no se trata del reparto equitativo de los argumentos entre ciudadanos que deliberan sobre lo que hay que pensar y hacer en la prueba del destino trágico, del desorden político o de la confusión ideológica. La razón moderna es el reparto con el otro, sea quien sea, esclavo, mujer, inmigrante, de la propia experiencia de cada uno de haber pecado y haber sido absuelto. La ética de la virtú corona el ejercicio único de la razón, la del perdón, ejercicio moderno. La conciencia clásica está en conflicto con los desórdenes apasionados que agitan el Olimpo. La conciencia moderna pone su suerte, con toda confianza, en manos de un padre único, justo y bueno.

Esta caracterización puede parecer demasiado cristiana. Pero, a través de innumerables episodios, la modernidad laica mantiene este dispositivo temporal, el de un <<gran relato>>. como ya se dijo, que promete en su momento la reconciliación del sujeto consigo mismo y la suspensión de su separación. Aunque securalizados, el relato de las Luces, la dialéctica romántica o especulativa y el relato marxista despliegan la misma historicidad que el cristianismo, porque conservan el principio escatológico. La continuación de la historia, siempre aplazada, restablecerá una relación plena y entera con la ley del Otro (O mayúscula) como lo fuera esta relación al principio; ley de Dios en el paraíso cristiano, ley de la Naturaleza en el derecho natural divagado por Rousseau, sociedad sin clases, antes que la familia, la propiedad y el Estado, imaginado por Engels. Siempre es un pasado inmemorial lo que resulta prometido como fin último. Es esencial para el imaginario moderno que proyecta hacia delante su legitimidad fundiéndola en un origen remoto. La escatología exige una arqueología. Este círculo que también es círculo hermenéutico caracteriza la historicidad como un imaginario moderno del tiempo.

La fábula que hemos escuchado es un relato claro está, pero la historia que cuenta no ofrece ninguno de los rasgos principales de la historicidad.

En primer lugar, es una historia física, que sólo concierne a la energía y a la materia como estado de la energía. El hombre es considerado como un sistema material complejo, la conciencia, como un efecto del lenguaje y el lenguaje, como un sistema material muy complejo.

Seguidamente, el tiempo puesto en juego en esta historia  sólo es diacronía. La sucesión está recortada en unidades de relojería  arbitrariamente definidas a partir de movimientos físicos  supuestamente uniformes y regulares. Este tiempo es una temporalidad de conciencia que exige que el pasado y el futuro, en su ausencia, sean considerados de todos modos como <<presentes>> al mismo tiempo que el presente. La fábula sólo admite tal temporalidad para los sistemas dotados de lenguaje simbólico, los cuales permiten efectivamente la memorización y la espera, es decir, la presentación de la ausencia. En cuanto a los acontecimientos (<<sucedió que…>>) que escondían la fabulosa historia de la energía, ésta no los espera y no los retiene.

En tercer lugar, esta historia de ningún modo está orientada hacia el horizonte de una emancipación. Cierto es que al final de la fábula narra el salvamento de un sistema muy diferenciado, una clase de supercerebro. Que éste pueda anticipar una salida y prepararla, será porque dispone necesariamente, sea cual sea, de un lenguaje simbólico,  de otro modo sería menos complejo que nuestro cerebro. El efecto o el sentimiento de una finalidad procede de la capacidad de los sistemas simbólicos que permiten controlar mejor lo que sucede a la luz de lo que ha sucedido. Pero más que de un círculo hermenéutico, la fábula representa  este efecto como un resultado de un cierre cibernético regulado de manera creciente.

En cuarto lugar, el futuro para nosotros hoy en día, que la fábula cuenta en pasado (no por casualidad), no constituye el objeto de una esperanza. La esperanza es la de un sujeto de la historia que se promete o a quien se le ha prometido una perfección final. La fábula posmoderna narra otra cosa completamente distinta. El Humano, o su Cerebro, es una formación material (es decir energética) muy improbable. Esta formación es necesariamente transitoria, ya que depende de las condiciones de vida terrestre, que no son eternas. La formación llamada Humano o Cerebro tendrá que ser superada por otra más compleja, si tiene que sobrevivir a la desaparición de estas condiciones. El Humano o el Cerebro no habrán sido más que un episodio dentro del conflicto entre la diferenciación y la entropía. La persecución de la complejidad no piede el perfeccionamiento del Humano, sino su mutación o su derrota en beneficio de un sistema más provechoso. Sin razón alguna, los Humanos se prevalen de ser el motor del desarrollo y lo confunden con el progreso de la conciencia y de la civilización, siendo sus productos, sus vehículos, sus testigos. Incluso las críticas son expresiones del desarrollo y a él contribuyen. Revoluciones, guerras, crisis, deliberaciones, invenciones y descubrimientos no son la <<obra del hombre>>, sino efectos y condiciones de la complejidad. Éstos siempre son ambivalentes para los Humanos, les aportan lo mejor y lo peor.

Sin ir más lejos, se ve bastante que la fábula no presenta los rasgos de un <<gran relato>> moderno. No responde a la petición de remisión o de emancipación. A falta de escatología, la mecanicidad y la contingencia conjuntas de la historia que cuentan dejan al pensamiento en un sufrimiento de finalidad. Este sufrimiento es el estado posmoderno del pensamiento, lo que se ha convenido llamar en estos tiempos como crisis, malestar o melancolía. La fábula no proporciona ningún remedio a este estado, propone una explicación. Una explicación no es una legitimización ni una condena. La fábula ignora el bien y el mal. En cuanto a lo verdadero y lo falso, se determinan de acuerdo con lo que es operacional o no, en el momento en que se juzga, bajo el régimen que se llama realismo.

El contenido de la fábula da una explicación de la crisis más el relato fabuloso es en sí mismo expresión de esta crisis. El contenido, el sentido de lo que habla, significa el fin de las esperanzas (el infierno para la modernidad). La forma del relato inscribe el contenido en el mismo relato, descendiéndolo a la clase de simple fábula. Ésta no se expone a la argumentación ni a la falsificación. Así es como explota el espacio de indeterminación que el sistema deja abierto al pensamiento hipotético.

Y es así tambén como se convierte en la aexpresión , casi infantil de la crisis del pensamiento actual: crisis de la modernidad que es el estado del pensamiento posmoderno. Sin pretensión cognitiva ni ético-política, se otorga un status poético o estético. Tan sólo se le tiene en cuenta por su fidelidad a la afección posmoderna, la melancolía. Primero cuenta el motivo. Pero también toda fábula es melancolía, ya que suple a la realidad.

Podríamos decir que la fábula que hemos escuchado es el discurso más pesimista que el posmoderno pueda hacerse de sí mismo. No hace más que prolongar los de Gailieo, Darwin y Freud: el hombre no es el centro del mundo, no es el primero (sino la última) de las criaturas, no es el dueño del discurso. Queda que, para calificar la fábula como pesimista, habría que tener el concepto de un al absoluto, independiente de los imaginarios producidos por el sistema humano.

Pero, después de todo, no se nos pide que creamos la fábula, sólo que reflexionemos. [1]

____________________

[1] Del libro: Lyotard, Jean-François. Moralidades Posmodernas. trad. Agustín Izquierdo. Tecnos, España 1998.

<<A qué se podían parecer el Humano y su Cerebro, o mejor el Cerebro y su Humano, en el momento en que abandonaron el planeta, antes de su destrucción, eso no lo contaba la historia.>>

Concluye así la fábula que vamos a escuchar.

El Sol va a explotar. Todo el sistema solar, incluido el planeta Tierra, se transforma en una enorme nova. Han transcurrido cuatro mil millones y medio de años solares desde que se narra esta fábula. Ya estaba previsto el final desde ese momento.

¿Realmente es una fábula? La duración de la vida de una estrella es determinable científicamente. Una estrella es una brasa en el vacío que transforma los elementos consumiéndose. Luego también es una laboratorio. La brasa acaba por extinguirse. El destello de la brasa puede analizarse y la composición definirse. Se puede prever cuándo se extinguirá la brasa. Lo mismo sucede con la estrella llamada Sol. El relato del fin de la Tierra no es en sí ficticio, más bien realista.

Lo que lleva a la ensoñación en estas últimas palabras de la historia no es que la tierra desaparezca con el sol, sino que algo tiene que librarse del incendio del sistema y salvarse de las cenizas. La fábula duda en señalar la cosa que debe sobrevivir. ¿El Humano y su Cerebro o el Cerebro y su Humano? En último lugar, ¿cómo debemos entender el <<tiene que salvarse>>? ¿Se trata de una necesidad, una obligación, una eventualidad?

Esta incertidumbre no deja de ser menos realista que la predicción del fin.

Imaginamos la inmensa zona de obras que será la Tierra durante milenios antes de que el Sol se apague. La Humanidad, lo que se llame todavía entonces Humanidad, prepara cuidadosamente las naves espaciales con rumbo al éxodo. Ha lanzado unas estaciones periféricas, a modo de afueras, que servirán de parada. Apunta los cohetes. Calcula el tiempo de las operaciones de embarque para dentro de miles de siglos después.

Podemos imaginar este ajetreo de hormigueo con cierto realismo ya que algunos medios son ya realizables en el momento de la narración de esta fábula. Queda, no quedan más que unos cuantos miles de millones de años solares para llevar a cabo los otros medios. Y, en especial, para lograr que lo que hoy se denomina humanos sea capaz de elaborarlos. Queda mucho por hacer, los humanos tienen que cambiar mucho para conseguirlo. La fábula dice que pueden conseguirlo (eventualidad), que se ven empujados a hacerlo (necesidad), que más les vale haerlo (obligación). No puede decir que será de ellos.

He aquí lo que contaba la fábula:

<<En la inmensidad del cosmos, sucedió que la energía  distribuida aleatoriamente en partículas se reagrupó por aquí y allá en cuerpos. Estos cuerpos constituían sistemas aislados, las galaxias, las estrellas. Disponían de una cantidad finita de energía, que utilizaban para mantenerse en sistemas estables. Transformaban continuamente las partículas que las componían, liberando nuevas partículas, especialmente fotones, y calor. Pero privados de energía aferente estos sistemas estaban destinados a desaparecer con el tiempo. Empezaba a faltar energía. Distribuida de manera diferencial para permitir el trabajo de transformación  y la supervivencia del conjunto, se desorganizaba, volvía al estado más probable, el caos y se propagaba al azar por el espacio. Este proceso había sido identificado hace tiempo con el nombre de entropía.

>>En una ínfima parte de la inmensidad cósmica, existía un ínfimo sistema de la galaxia llamado Vía Láctea. Y, entre los miles de millones de estrellas que la componían, había una llamada Sol. Como todos los sistemas cerrados, el Sol emitía calor, luz y radiaciones en dirección de los cuerpos, los planetas, sobre los que ejercía atracción. Y, como en todos los sistemas cerrados, la esperanza de vida del Sol estaba limitada por la entropía. Cuando se contó la fábula, el Sol estaba aproximadamente en el equinocio de su vida. Le quedaban aún ante si cuatro mil millones y medio de años antes de desaparecer.

>>Entre los planetas, estaba la Tierra. Y sucedió algo inesperado en la superficie de la Tierra. Gracias a la conjunción fortuita de diversas formas de energía –moléculas constitutivas de los elementos terrestres, en especial el agua, la atmósfera como filtro de las radiaciones solares, la temperatura ambiente–, pasó que sistemas más complejos y más improbables, las células, se sintetizaron a partir de los sistemas moleculares. Fue éste el primer acontecimiento cuyo enigmático suceso condicionaría el resto  de la historia, incluso la posibilidad de contarla. La formación de las células llamadas “vivas” suponía que sistemas diferenciados de un determinado orden, el reino mineral, podían, en determinadas condiciones, las que se daban en ese momento en la superficie terrestre, producir sistemas diferenciados de un orden superior, las primeras algas. Luego el proceso contrario a la entropía era posible.

>>Un signo muy destacable de la complejidad presentada por los unicelulares era la capacidad de reproducción me diante división en dos partes casi idénticas al original, pero independientes. Lo que se llamó escisiparidad parecía poder asegurar la perpetuación de los sistemas unicelulares en general, a pesar de la extinción de los individuos.

>>Así nacieron al vida y la muerte. Contrariamente a las moléculas, los sistemas vivos se veían obligados para sobrevivir a consumir energías externas regularmente (el metabolismo). Por un lado, esta dependencia los hacía extremadamente frágiles, ya que vivían amenazados por la falta de energías apropiadas para su metabolismo. Por otro lado, los sistemas vivos estaban, por esta afluencia de energías externas, libres del previsible destino de extinción en el tiempo que alcanzaba a los sistemas aislados. La esperanza de vida podía “negociarse”, al menos en determinados casos.

>>Otro acontecimiento actuó en los sistemas vivos, la reproducción sexuada. Este procedimiento de reproducción erea mucho más improbable que la escisiparidad, pero permitía que los vástagos se diferenciaran más de los genitores, ya que la ontogénesis procedía de la combinación más o menos aleatoria de dos códigos genéticos distintos. Un margen de incertidumbre se abría entre una genereación y otra. Había más oportunidades de que se produjeran acontecimientos inesperados. En particular, “una mala lectura” de los códigos ancestrales podía originar mutaciones genéticas.

>>En cuanto a la siguiente secuencia de esta historia, ya la contó un tal Sr. Darwin. Lo que llamó evolución tenía de considerable que, no más que la secuencia anterior (que llevaba de lo físico a lo biológico), no suponía finalidad alguna, simplemente el principio de la selección mecánica de los sistemas mejor “adaptados”. Nuevos sistemas vivos aparecían al azar. Se hallaban confrontados a los sistemas ya existentes, ya que todos tenían que procurarse energías para sobrevivir. Siendo limitada la cantidad de fuentes de energía, la competición entre sistemas era inevitable. Nació así la guerra. Los sistemas más eficientes tenían más oportunidades de ser seleccionados mecánicamente.

Supernova de Kepler

>>Así es como después de algún tiempo (muy breve en el reloj astronómico) el sistema llamado Hombre fue seleccionado. Era un sistema extremadamente improbable; de la misma manera que lo es que un cuadrúpedo se mantenga de pie sobre las patas traseras. Son conocidas las inmediatas implicaciones de esta etapa: las manos se liberan para la prensión, la cavidad craneal se equilibra en el eje vertical, se ofrece un mayor volumen al cerebro, la masa de las neuronas corticales aumenta y se diversifica. Surgieron complejas técnicas corporales, manuales sobre todo, paralelamente a esas técnicas simbólicas llamadas lenguas humanas. Estas técnicas fueron las prótesis flexibles y eficaces que permitieron  que el sistema Hombre, tan improbable y precario, compensara su debilidad frente a los adversarios.

>>Con estas técnias, sucedió algo no menos inesperado que lo que ocurrión con la aparición de los unicelulares. Éstos estaban dotados de la capacidad de reproducirse a sí mismos. Del mismo modo , el lenguaje simbólico, gracias a la recursividad, era capaz de constituir los elementos entre sí, infinitamente, produciendo siempre sentido, es decir, dando que pensar y actuar. El lenguaje simbólico, siendo autorreferencial, poseía además la facultad de tomarse a sí mismo como objeto, luego de memorizarse y criticarse. Afirmadas por estas propiedades del lenguaje, las técnicas materiales padecían también una mutación: podían referirse a sí mismas, acumularse y mejorar los resultados.

>>El lenguaje permitió por otra parte que los humanos superaran las formas rígidas de un principio (casi instintivas) según las cuales vivían juntos en las primeras comunidades. Nacieron formas menos probables de organización, distintas unas de otras. Entraron en competición. Como en todo sistema vivo, el éxito dependía de las aptitudes para descubrir, captar y salvaguardar las fuentes de energía que necesitaban. A este respecto dos grandes acontecimientos marcaron la historia de las comunidades humanas, la revolución neolítica y la revolución industrial. Ambos descubrieron nuevas fuentes de energía o nuevos medios de explotación, afectando de esta manera incluso a la estructura de los sistemas sociales.

>>Durante mucho tiempo (si contamos el tiempo humano), surgieron al alzar técnicas e instituciones colectivas. La supervivencia de los sistemas improbables y frágiles como los grupos humanos escapaban así a su control. Sucedió por ello que técnicas más sofisticadas se consideraran curiosidades y se descuidaran hasta el punto de olvidarlas.  Sucedió también que comunidades más diferenciadas que otras en materia política o económica las deshicieron creando  sistemas más sencillos pero más vigorosos (como ya se había dado entre las especies vivas).

>>Igual que las propiedades del lenguaje simbólico permitieron que las técnicas materiales conservaran, corrigieran y optimizaran su eficacia, sucedió lo mismo con los modos de organización social. Instancias de autoridad, cargadas de ese control, aparecieron en el campo social, económico, político, cognitivo, cultural.

>>Algún tiempo después, ocurrió que los sistemas denominados liberales democráticos se mostraron como los más apropiados para ejercer esas regulaciones. Efectivamente, dejaban los programas abiertos al debate, permitían en principio que cada unidad accediera a las funciones de decisión, maximizaban de esta manera la cantidad de energía humana necesaria para los sistemas. Esta flexibilidad demostró ser a la larga más eficaz que la fijación rígida de los roles en jerarquías estables. Contrariamente a los sistemas cerrados acontecidos en el curso de la historia humana, las democracias liberales admitían en su seno un espacio de competición entre unidades del sistema. Este espacio favorecía la eclosión de nuevas técnicas materiales, simbólicas y comunitarias. Ciertamente se derivaban frecuentes crisis y a veces peligrosas para la supervivencia de esos sistemas. Pero, en total, los resultados de éstos crecían. Este proceso fue llamado progreso. Una representación escatológica de la historia de los sistemas humanos.

>>A la larga, los sistemas abiertos se hicieron con una completa victoria sobre el resto de los sistemas, humanos, vivos y físicos, en lucha en la superficie del planeta Tierra. Parecía que nada pudiera frenar, ni tan siquiera orientar, su desarrollo. Crisis, guerras, revoluciones contribuían a acelerarlo, especialmente dando lugar a nuevas fuentes de energía y estableciendo un nuevo control sobre su explotación. Hasta hizo falta que los sistemas abiertos moderaran su éxito respecto de los demás sistemas a fin de preservar el conjunto llamado ecosistema del desarreglo catastrófico.

>>Sólo la desaparición ineluctable del sistema solar por completo parecía poder hacer fracasar la continuidad del desarrollo. Para hacer frente a este desafío, el sistema se había puesto ya (en la época en que se contó la fábula) a desarrollar unas prótesis capaces de perpetuarlo después de que hubieran desaparecido las fuentes de energía de origen solar que contribuyeron a la aparición y supervivencia de los sistemas vivos y, en particular, los humanos.

>>En la época en que se contó esta fábula, las investigaciones en curso del momento, es decir, en desorden: lógica, econometría y teoría monetaria, informática, física de los conductores, astrofísica y astronáutica, biología y medicina, genética y dietética, teoría de las catástrofes , teoría del caos, estrategia y balística, técnicas deportivas, teoría de los sistemas, lingüística y literatura potencial, todas estas investigaciones  estaban consagradas, de cerca o de lejos, a demostrar y remodelar el cuerpo llamado  “humano”, o a sustituirlo, de tal manera que el cerebro fuera capaz de funcionar con la ayuda de las únicas energías disponibles en el cosmos. Se fraguaba así el último éxodo  del sistema neguentrópico lejos de la Tierra.

>>A qué se podían parecer el Humano y su Cerebro, o mejor el Cerebro y su Humano, en el momento en que abandonaron para siempre el planeta, eso la historia no lo cuenta.>> [1]

____________________

[1] Del libro: Lyotard, Jean-François. Moralidades Posmodernas. trad. Agustín Izquierdo. Tecnos, España 1998.

William Blake; left, The Ancient of Days (1794), right, Newton (1795).

… cruel Works
Of many Wheels I view, wheel without wheel, with cogs tyrannic
Moving by compulsion each other: not as those in Eden: which
Wheel within Wheel in freedom revolve in harmony & peace.
     ~from Jerusalem, William Blake

… a clear moral vision implies simplifications and, with them, acts of cruelty and injustice.
     ~from Killing Time, Paul Feyerabend

Got myself embroiled in a fierce debate in an egroup recently when a member cross-posted entries from another egroup about the progress of women’s inclusion in the sciences. What irked me the most about the weepy accounts were the usual feminist pieties about patriarchal oppression, and an elitist condescension towards the “typical” American as anti-intellectual and brutish, specifically with regards to the issue of teaching creationism in schools. I reprint below my side of the debate which escalated faster than a California wildfire. It got really nasty on the other side–despite my attempts at civility and humor to diffuse the tension–but I must admit that I myself can be extremely polemic and excoriating in my sarcasm.

I reprint my replies as is–constipated language and all, including my share of nastiness–with minimal editing, such as removing any references to persons. This is therefore a biased account of the debate with heaps of spur-of-the-moment madness.

Reply No. 1:

The observation below of America being anti-scientific and anti-intellectual goes against the fact that it is still leading in science and technology. Most Nobel winners in the sciences in the past 50 years are Americans, as opposed to Germans and British in the early 20th century. This would not have been possible had science and technology not permeated American society and its institutions. I would even go as far as to say that Protestantism has in fact something to do with this; the “protestant ethic” played a big role in the advance of American capitalism that also drove (and is driven by) science and technology.

Science is in fact the dominant discourse. Attempts by its practitioners to eradicate creationism by de-legitimizing it based on its own true/false criterion is really a form of epistemological dogmatism. There is an underlying conceit in the claim that the scientific criteria is the only legitimate form of knowledge. I can empathize how a creation account of origins can be more meaningful to people than some esoteric account of reality based on particle physics. The “meanings” these religious accounts generate can be more ethically powerful and productive in society than the dry, dispirited accounts of obsessive compulsive scientists.

As for women in science, the accounts below are out of date by 2-3 decades of affirmative action. Feminists need to stop undermining women by promoting this ideology of victimization. So where are the women in science? I know for a fact that chemistry is dominated by women in the Philippines. It must be a cultural thing, not necessarily “patriarchal oppression”. I contend that middle class women in the Philippines are more liberated than their American counterparts largely because of their maids and nannies. (Yet another form of oppression?)

Reply No. 2:

Tyranny of experts! Scientists, intellectuals, and academics do not constitute a privileged class over and above those who did not go to college or read a lot of books. Everyone has their function; when my toilet backs up, I call the plumber. Average Joe may not be a card carrying member of the ivory tower, but I would not dismiss him as stupid and brutish; besides, higher education is not a guarantee of enlightenment (e.g., James Watson).

The diaspora of scientists during and after WW2 is not fortuitous; they were escaping the brutal fascism in Europe. The high civilizations that produced Michaelangelo, Beethoven, and the Enlightenment, also produced the crematoriums of Auschwitz. American capitalism and democracy provided opportunities and freedom. Let us not quickly dismiss as anti-intellectual and “distrustful of science” the society that continues to welcome scientific talent fleeing repressive regimes and poverty.

The neat account of science as falsification of theory is a Popperian fantasy that is contradicted by history. The development of science is fraught with theoretical dogmatism, irrational procedures, overlooking of anomalies, and ad hoc adjustments of models. (C’mon let’s keep it honest!) New paradigms emerge, Kuhn observes, usually not from the process of falsification, but simply from the old guards dying out. Not that the new paradigm is “more rational” but only that it leads to more interesting research. The line between legitimate science and “pseudo”-science is therefore thin and may just be a matter of cultural practice.

It is not my intention to trivialize the struggles of the women’s movement–the fight for equal opportunity–only to point out the hysterical witch-hunt for “patriarchal oppression” in every nook and cranny of society’s power structures. If women truly want equal standing they should not demand special protections, grievance committees, PC speech codes, which, I agree with my feminist idol (and lesbian) Camille Paglia, is reactionary and paternalistic.

Reply No. 3:

What is my agenda? Nothing less than displacing the privileged status of science as a form of knowledge based on positivist claims of “objectivity”, especially if this positivism is deployed to gawk at, belittle, coerce alternative or “illegitimate” forms of knowledge. I do not lose sleep if somewhere creationism or intelligent design is taught in a science class, because I trust that people everywhere KNOW what is good for them and their children. They do not need experts and “intellectual elites” to tell them THAT, and there is no need to deride them as “anti-intellectuals”.

Kuhn was not apologizing for the “shortcomings of science” he was describing its state of affairs. A paradigm shift is not merely accelerated progress but a profound break that requires a suspension of belief in what you know to be rational, even factual; a new paradigm is adopted not because the old guard were eventually swayed to accept the new one, but simply because they died out. This resistance to conversion is due to the incommensurability of paradigms–the terms are different, the methods are different, even what are considered to be “facts” are different.

If anything, Kuhn depicts scientists as CONSERVATIVES, and scientific progress only made possible by their disciplinary commitment to theory. This is why it’s incompatible with the heroic account of scientific progress, and with Popper’s idealist fantasy of scientists constantly undermining themselves and their theories by refutation. There is no “objective” meta-method of refutation that is free from contamination by the new paradigm; in other words, refutation is a priori from a biased perspective. Feyerabend even goes as far as to say that anything goes in science, there is no method, there is change but no “progress” (oops, sounds like Obama?).

Yes, I do like Feyerabend’s epistemological anarchism (hello!) because it is destabilizing–it knocks off science from its privileged status above “illegitimate” (heretical?) knowledges. He also has a sense of humor. Creationism and intelligent design has every right to fight for its place in scientific discourse, and the public has every right to say it does not give a s**t about our pet theories. It is quite sobering to consider these, as Ernst Mach did, as simply convenient fictions (rather than “inconvenient truths”?).

Reply No. 4:

Puzzle-solving is an activity of normal science, i.e., within the field of view of a paradigm. It happens under conditions of lexical stability, and does not deal with complications of revolutionary change. Within the paradigm there is strong commitment to shared beliefs, values, metaphysics, and, may I add, delusions. Practitioners thus use the “set criteria” to assess what constitutes acceptable knowledge within the paradigm.

Underneath, science also appeals to extra-scientific knowledge, i.e., what it deems as “irrational”, e.g., the speculative unity of knowledge. (There is no rational basis, for example, for simplicity in theories; it is an aesthetic preference.) Lyotard calls this the recurrence of the narrative in the scientific. These undermine its claims to pure “objectivity” and its privileged status over what it deems as “irrational” and “illegitimate”.

Kuhn is actually not radical enough for me. I actually prefer Feyerabend because he is funny, and he does not mystify science.

Reply No. 5:

Anything goes! No non-negotiables. I don’t have a problem with heterogeneous practices at all, and of the neck of science put under the boot of the public. I think it becomes more human by saving it from the obsessiveness of puzzle-solving which often becomes an end in itself. I do not wish to assume the heroic role of “protector” of the integrity of science, as I don’t believe in an antiseptic, monolithic, totalitarian vision of “Science” that needs to be preserved. It’s more interesting to have messy and porous borders. Misconceptions go away if there are no preconceptions–ossified, enshrined ideas that feed fundamentalism. Yes, I accuse big “Science” of the very thing it levels against religious fundamentalists, and that scientists can be as coercive because of their disciplinary commitment to theory. (Bellarmine may actually have been acting more rationally than Galileo.)

Anomalies are regularly overlooked (or worse ignored) because of this commitment and the need to make progress in puzzle-solving. How can Newton’s account of force-at-a-distance which was unexplained be “more rational” than Ptolemy’s crystalline spheres? I’m not suggesting a return to Ptolemaic cosmology, only that what are problematic in new paradigms may not have been at all in supplanted ones. They are only absurd from a post-mortem perspective, and only within a small group of specialists who think about those things, and who have delusions about the import of their theories.

Incidentally [after I was accused of reading only Wikipedia], there is also nothing wrong with Wikipedia; I like it precisely because it is unofficial, error-prone, and vulnerable–a good sign of democratic procedures–and it’s free!

Epilogue:

What a bag of hot air! Debates expose hysterics and hard liners in all of us, especially if we are argued into a corner; we tend to freeze into extreme positions, as evidenced above. I do love the rhetorical energy, though, that is released by the urgency of argumentation. I got this from my father, a polemic to the core, who in his youth often got in trouble by argumentation, even afterward, when he became a Christian and a Sunday School teacher.

Sources and Related Links (Including Wikipedia!):

• Thomas Kuhn at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
• Paul Feyerabend at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
• Karl Popper at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
• William Blake at Wikipedia

In order to determine what the presence of the ghost or spectre means for the present, in way of its effect on temporal linearity and our own understanding of history, one must first approach the cause of the apparition and its uncanny mobilization. To be sure, the ghost as we have discussed, is the rebirth and reiteration of a past historical moment, a hazy calling from beyond the grave; the ghost qua ghost is certainly always the result of a death. But, when speaking of the ghost as the result of death, we are inherently speaking of two deaths; both the demise of the individual who proceeds to haunt over us alongside (and always bound up in) the death of a moment, a time and a chronological ordering. However, if it is indeed the case that ghosts and therefore time can repeat themselves, then what is to be said of history? If it is to be thought that, through the ghost, history makes a comeback, then ultimately we are calling into question the very stability of time logic and our own perceptions of the past as a lost, irretrievable moment. If as Jameson stated, our own present can “under exceptional circumstances betray us” (Jameson, 2008,p.39), then what are these circumstances and how do they relate to a loss of our sense of history and thereby result in the conjuration of the spectre. Throughout this chapter I shall investigate the idea that in fact history itself has come to an end, the ultimate death, which has thereby resulted in both reported sightings of ghosts and the untimely revival of ghost hunting as a method of creating a (virtual) present that remains indebted to a lost history whereby a sense of temporal stability is created for its residents. The death of history is then, to be sure, a worthy cause for the return of the spectre and a return to spectrality as a tool of contemporary socio-cultural analysis. I shall examine three variants of the theorising that history has come to an end, beginning with that of Francis Fukuyama on the end of a political philosophy, moving to the loss of narrative and finally the modernist era.

Fukuyama first introduced the idea that political philosophy had reached its optimum status and thus resulted in the end of history in an article for the journal The National Interest in 1989, entitled “The End of History?”. Fukuyama’s article outlined the end of history as he saw it, claiming that “liberal democracy may constitute the ‘end point of mankind’s ideological evolution’ and the ‘final form of human government’ and as such ‘constituted the end of history’.” (Fukuyama, 2006, xi), a concept inspired by the writings of the philosopher Alexandre Kojève. Fukuyama develops his ideas further in his The End of History and The Last Man (2006) whereby he works through both Hegel and Marx’s notions of the end of history being satisfied by a single dominating politics, Liberalism and Communism respectively. Fukuyama wades through Hegel’s take on Plato’s thymos, a deep rooted desire in man to be recognised, valued as himself. Hegel deduced that the desire to be recognised was the pivotal factor in man producing dictatorial leadership, therefore at the end of history, all men would see themselves as equal to all other men and liberalism would be the natural progression of man in reaching this point. For Marx, the finishing point of history meant an end to class and the bourgeoisie, resulting in, as with Hegel, all men being equal, this is seen by Marx as the point at which the state dealt with the problems of capital and attained Communist rule. Fukuyama claims that the end of totalitarian and authoritarian regimes in the West, both the failing of communism and fascist politics, has given way to a plateau of democratic liberalism thus resulting in the equality of men, the degradation of class and in return brought about the end of political history. Through the synthesis of both Hegelian and Marxian conceptions of the end of history, Fukuyama develops a historical demise that is non-apocalyptic, a positive outlook for the future of mankind.

For Fukuyama then, history is, therefore, to be measured by politics and its philosophy; history has no goals only those sought out by man (thymos) and if as Fukuyama purports these goals have been engulfed in contemporary liberal democratic capitalism then, for sure, history only now exists as a measurement of the periodic past. With the end of historical political evolution man can return to a more animalistic way of life, existing to satisfy his own desires, but this perceived satisfaction surely comes with its own set of destabilising affects? If, as Fukuyama claims, liberal democracy has spelled the death knell for history and further political horizon then why does society as a whole remain dissonant in what is seemingly the height of socio-political development? It is apparent that with the end of history comes an uncertain future and where should one find stability if not but the past? If there are no great ideologies left to be realised then society has indeed reached its fullest potential. However, the question must be asked ‘what comes next?’ and there would appear to be a lack of answers. Perhaps this is the reason that the spectre has made its return, perhaps at the death of history comes the prophetic shadows of the past to provide stability to our uncertain present and future. The end of history leaves one feeling more than a little pessimistic about what is yet to come; Fukuyama claims that this gloomy outlook of our current and past century “stands in sharp contrast to the optimism of the previous one.” (2006, p.04), and yet the Victorians too felt the need to seek spirits for answers. Fukuyama states that the optimism felt in the nineteenth century was predominantly the result of two beliefs in what the future held;

The first was the belief that modern science would improve human life by conquering disease and poverty. Nature, long man’s adversary, would be mastered by modern technology and made to serve the end of human happiness. Second, free democratic governments would continue to spread to more and more countries around the world.

(Fukuyama, 2006, p.04)

If we have, as is suggested in The End of History and The Last Man (2006), seen the event horizon of political evolution and with it a collapse in political ideology then we are witnessing a time when only the past can be conjured to make sense of the future, where spectres that have remained dormant for years, raise their weary heads to nod us in the right direction. But, we have not just lost our way in terms of how the development of our society has come to a historical end in terms of how political praxis now fails to work towards a new order , but also in the way that we consider ourselves to pass periodically from one historical moment to the next, through the narrative, the great events that define one historical moment from the next. This is the death of something far more organic than politics and is symptomatic of what Lyotard defines as the ‘postmodern condition’.

For Lyotard, grand narratives are what provide societies with a history, they are the enforced universal accounts of a temporal period that are used to distinguish one great moment from the next (race, class, freedom). Narratives provide us with a universalised account of the past and indeed it can be said that one views all past historical moments as universals, carrying parcels of ideology, philosophy and politics particular to that time. Through the grand narrative we have always made sense of our present and our past, narratives are how we have defined ourselves in history since records began, but for Lyotard this causes problems. Lyotard no longer sees the world or history as running in grand narratives, he claims that postmodernism has provided us with more complex desires and a heterogeneous society, therefore he “opposes the very aspiration to domesticate the world by bringing it under the rubric of an explanation” (Browning, 2000, p.40). The death of the narrative therefore emancipates us from the histories of the past, in contrast to Fukuyama; Lyotard sees our present as floating independently through a time of perpetual flux that can no longer be summed up by a single ideology or politics. For Lyotard validation comes from technological and scientific advances, through the ongoing development of a society, “he sees their role in legitimating knowledge in the modern world as redundant in light of the advent of postmodernity” (Browning, 2000, p.01). Lyotard claims that “The grand narrative has lost its credibility, regardless of what mode of unification it uses” (Lyotard, 2001, p.37) and is therefore dead, broken down and out of use, according to Jameson, in an introduction to Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition (2001) they have become “buried master-narratives” (2001, xii). If this is so and taking into account Fukuyama’s claim that the horizon of political ideology has also been reached, where in our own conception of time do we sit? If the manner, in which we distinguish our time from others, both politically and through historic narration, has ended, it should be of no surprise that spectres haunt us.

Through ghost hunting and the conjuration of spectres I posit that we are digging up as it were, what Jameson refers to as “buried” narratives. The resurrection of the past grounds us in the present; history’s spectres, those that appear from the death of history itself, confirm our present through a distorted, bastardised version of the past that at the least presents us with what we are not. By this I mean to say that on encountering the ghost one can imagine that it is not him or herself that is ‘out of joint’, as the anachronism presents itself purely as an anachronism, something that has appeared incorrectly in the linearity of time, yet it confirms to its audience that there is a definite past and furthermore a definite future. Although the ghost itself is temporally disjointed, those who witness its apparition can be sure that they are not.

Certainly this exhumation of narrative is to be thought of as hauntological, the ghost making its return to finish its business, to set the future straight by temporarily bringing with it the disjoining of the past and present. Hauntology here describes, when mobilised through the spectre, the idea that history is capable of being repetitive and that perhaps through dialogue with the ghost, the occult enthusiast learns more about the passing of time and his own place within it than those that postulate over its demise. But the ghost and the death of history are by no means limited to the end or burying of narrative and politics; as the notion of postmodernity in regards to the loss of narrated legitimisation is integral to Lyotards reading of history, so too is it intrinsic to Jameson’s understanding of the complexities of our time.

Jameson maps history through periods of cultural change (i.e. Renaissance, Enlightenment, Modernity), and claims that the time in which we currently reside is that of the postmodern. Postmodernism is “the waning or extinction of the hundred-year-old modern movement” (Jameson, 2008,p.01) and is characterised by “a new depthlessness” and “a whole new culture of the image or the simulacrum; a consequent weakening of historicity” (Jameson, 2008,p.06). For Jameson high modernity has ended and with it all the originality of cultural production, indeed there is, in Jameson’s view, nothing new to come, no new memories to be created but purely the mechanical reproduction of the past, subsequently resulting in the death of history and the rise of spectrality; “The crisis of historicity now dictates a return”(Jameson,2008,p.25), a return of the spectre and a return of the past. Postmodernism as the historical successor to modernism brings about what Jameson describes as ‘the death of the subject’; as there is no forward motion to history in terms of cultural and social activity, a resulting death occurs of cultural history proper and so a perceived progression can only happen through the spectralisation of things. This a theory that is also prevalent in the work of Jean Baudrillard, Baudrillard endorses the idea that there is no longer an original and that we live in a world where everything is merely a copy of itself (the simulacrum), where “truth, reference and objective causes have ceased to exist.” (Baudrillard,1999, p.171). The subject dies as it no longer has an organic original to carry with it to the future, the subject is replaced by a replica, a copy, determining the dawn of the spectre and an intrinsically hauntological occurrence, as we shall see, it is through this process that “nostalgia assumes its full meaning.” (Baudrillard, 1999, p.170). The subject returns as a degraded copy of what it once was, the same can be said of the human subject: the ghost is the replication and reiteration of a past moment, a past body. We have reached this hauntological moment where the erasure of history has ultimately led to its conjuration from beyond the grave, through what Jameson succinctly describes as being;

the disappearance of a sense of history, the way in which our entire social system has little by little begun to lose its capacity to retain its own past, has begun to live in a perpetual present and in a perpetual change that obliterates traditions of the kind which all earlier social information have had, in one way or another, to preserve. (Jameson, 1999, p.20)

The obliteration of history and historical traditions alike give rise to temporal instability, nostalgia, discontent with the present and a longing for the past, this is why ghosts continue to proliferate through contemporary culture. History is dead; the evidence of its demise lies in a grave filled with proliferated liberalism, forgotten narratives and exhausted cultural practice. The ghost hunters are the ones that cry for the exhumation of these decaying remains of our cultural past. Through divination and necromancy, hopes of the resurrection of history are kept alive; spectres provide the proof that although history for us has been lost, it is not at rest and wishes to make its eerie presence known. But, the ghosts of the end of history are not only lurking in the backdrop of the present, to be sure, they haunt every aspect of modern day life, reliving through postmodern cultural practice as the regurgitation of the past. Postmodernity and late capitalism have fed on society’s yearn for the past, commodifying both her remains and the ghost proper alike.

The (man in the) robe

A memory—no, really a flash/back— déjà vu—an event happened long ago yet probably never happened. I approach an intersection (walking up the street from the left (perhaps from the South)) and reach the intersection of (at least) five streets and turn left. Left. Walk up (down) the street looking in shop windows. A corner bar. A novelty shop set back from the street like the storefronts of 50s Scottsbluff. A corner bookstore I cannot enter. What differends does it make? At the end of the street immediately before it drops off into nothing (see Bailey’s Café) I turn left again down the same street. I know this one. Boylston. Brookline, MA. Or is it Broadway. Scottsbluff. NE. Yes, the broad way again and I turn around and come up (why up?) the street retracing my steps past the bookstore, the door set in from the street, display cases in the windows left and right, old wooden door, mostly glass, but when I get inside it’s a horror shop. I run. Frightened. Back up the street past several bars back to the five corners. And the flash/back is over. Over? Did it ever begin? Images: real. Situation: not. A dream? Who came from New York to Scottsbluff and needed Broad Way to feel at home. After fifty years the old Midwest Theater is the West Nebraska Arts Center. Once the home of The Robe, and Richard Burton so broody handsome and Victor Mature so hot. And a few years later Ben Hur and Charlton Heston so overblown and that jaw of his like a prosthetic, so frightening then and no wonder he loved guns you could see it in that goddam chariot race if you were looking. Give my junior high school memory to Richard Burton and Victor Mature any day. I have to decide which of five streets to continue and then I’m back down at the bottom of the street and walking past the shops which have all changed except the bar. But I manage to walk by. Bye. Bye.

            The differends between modernism and postmodernism show up when the modernists,  who are connected to history, the body, and the conscious mind, and the postmodernists,  who provisionally attach themselves to a kind of utopian future anterior, the psyche, and the unconscious mind, decide, if they are modernists, that bodies are real and take precedence over the language that names them, or, if they are postmodernists, that language, image, and technology map and give name to what we call “reality”: our bodies, our beliefs, and even our selves.**

Are bodies real that walk down the same haunted street time and time again (or is it a dream I remember or my rich fantasy life) “connected to history, the body, and the conscious mind” or do “language, image, and technology map and give name to what we call “reality”: our bodies, our beliefs, and even our selves.” Language, image, technology (words I use, images from my past—real, dream, or imagined—computer under my fingers, the screen vibrating in my face and no doubt causing seizures by the minute) map (draw pictures of, overlay the truth of with symbols and simulacra) and give names to it (Broadway, the broad way, the b(roadway), the (bro)ad-way, or the Main Street). 

Let’s leave the worlds of Scottsbluff Midwest Theater Victor Vitanza Cynthia Haynes Lisa Coleman Richard Burton Victor Mature (by all means that charlatan Heston) and wander back to the year of my birth (Wittgenstein’s writing and my life are perhaps coterminous? and which of the roads at the five corners shall we take?).   

The theater (in/of) my dreams

496. Grammar does not tell us how language must be constructed in order to fulfil its purpose, in order to have such-and-such an effect on human beings. It only describes and in no way explains the use of signs.
497. The rules of grammar may be called “arbitrary,” if, that is to mean that the aim of the grammar is nothing but that of the language. If someone says “If our language had not this grammar, it could not express these facts” –it should be asked what “could” means here.
499. To say “This combination of words makes no sense” excludes it from the sphere of language and thereby bounds the domain of language. But when one draws a boundary it may be for various kinds of reason. . .the purpose may be to prevent someone from getting in or out…[it may] be part of a game and the players be supposed, say, to jump over the boundary; or it may shew where the property…ends …. So if I draw a boundary line that is not yet to say what I am drawing it for.
500.  When a sentence is called senseless, it is not as it were its sense that is senseless. But a combination of words is being excluded from the language, withdrawn from circulation.” ***

496. The use of grammar in my writ(ing) is confusing only because you expect a certain construction that will, in itself qua grammar, explain what effect I want the symbols I am using (the words, the squiggles on the screen) to have. My words describe, they do not explain.
497. “Could” is the operative word, of course, of course, and no one can talk to a horse, a horse.
499. What boundaries I draw with my words may well be my secret. Or, if I want you to play my game, I will have to ex(plain) the rules. Or you will have to in(vent) your own rules for my game, and we can work (toget)her (or (separate)ly) with/from the allowable parameters of the (bound)arie(s) I have drawn to decide what I drew them for (can one even draw bounds?).
500. When you call my writing “senseless”, it’s not what I mean that you call senseless. The boundaries I have drawn around my words do not, perhaps, have my desired effect because they only describe what I mean and do not explain to you what I mean.

The overlay of simulacra on my life begins with my walk down the street or my first seizure in second grade OR the seizure I’m having right now. Do my seizures seize my life, or does my brain seize my life and take it down streets it’s been down before but does not recognize, or do I seize my life away from my brain and let it go where it wants (needs) to go without my brain (thinking) to interfere. My seizures, in any event, “surround an area with a fence or a line or otherwise, the purpose may be to prevent someone from getting in or out; but it may also be part of a game” a game a game a game to which neither you nor I know the rules, and I can’t imagine why academics and rhetoricians and composition teachers [or even YOU] you could (what do we mean by “could”) imagine that “language, image, and technology map and give name to what we call “reality”: our bodies, our beliefs, and even our selves.” When there is no reality. All is differends, conflicts irresolvable “for lack of a rule of judgment applicable to both arguments.” ****

The (not so) broad way

When the academic rhetoricians have settled the question of “reality,” I want to know what they’ve found. And I don’t care if it’s modern, postmoderen, or post-postmodern.

**Coleman, Lisa, and Lorien Goodman. Introduction.
“Rhetoric/Composition:
Intersections/
Impasses/
Differends.”
Enculturation 5.1 (Fall 2003): http://enculturation.gmu.edu/5_1/intro.html 
*** Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Philosophical Investigations, Third Ed. Trans. G.E.M. Anscombe. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1958 (138-139).
**** Lyotard, Jean François. The Differend: Phrases in Dispute. Trans. George Van Den Abbeele. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1988. p. xi.

Da “The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge” di J.F.Lyotard (1984)

Science has always been in conflict with narratives. Judged by the yardstick of science, the majority of them prove to be fables. But to the extent that science does not restrict itself to stating useful regularities and seeks the truth, it is obliged to legitimate the rules of its own game. It then produces a discourse of legitimation with respect to its own status, a discourse called philosophy. I will use the term modern to designate any science that legitimates itself with reference to a metadiscourse of this kind making an explicit appeal to some grand narrative, such as the dialectics of Spirit, the hermeneutics of meaning, the emancipation of the rational or working subject, or the creation of wealth. For example, the rule of consensus between the sender and addressee of a statement with truth-value is deemed acceptable if it is cast in terms of a possible unanimity between rational minds: this is the Enlightenment narrative, in which the hero of knowledge works toward a good ethico-political end — universal peace. As can be seen from this example, if a metanarrative implying a philosophy of history is used to legitimate knowledge, questions are raised concerning the validity of the institutions governing the social bond: these must be legitimated as well. Thus justice is consigned to the grand narrative in the same way as truth.

Simplifying to the extreme, I define postmodern as incredulity toward metanarratives. This incredulity is undoubtedly a product of progress in the sciences: but that progress in turn presupposes it. To the obsolescence of the metanarrative apparatus of legitimation corresponds, most notably, the crisis of metaphysical philosophy and of the university institution which in the past relied on it. The narrative function is losing its functors, its great hero, its great dangers, its great voyages, its great goal. It is being dispersed in clouds of narrative language elements–narrative, but also denotative, prescriptive, descriptive, and so on. Conveyed within each cloud are pragmatic valencies specific to its kind. Each of us lives at the inter section of many of these. However, we do not necessarily establish stable language combinations, and the properties of the ones we do establish are not necessarily communicable.

CAPITOLO VI

LA CASA DI RIPOSO

Tu sei una macchina, tu sei un ospedale, si ascolta in Vivadixiesubmarinetransmissionplot. Io sono un ospedale costruito per nessuno. E me ne vanto, e ci canto su. Ma sono un’anomalia, un caso particolare: qui a Oik sono un po’ tutti operatori umanitarî, si specializzano in ospedali funzionali e accoglienti, salutari, paradisi artificiali per morti viventi. Nella verde Via Verdi, qui vicino, c’è il favoloso ospedale del Figliol Prodigo, attuale sede della casa di riposo.

Io e il Menecacci, come tutti, siamo stati almeno una volta lì dentro. Ambiente allegro triste da morire. Un mondo di soli anziani o sole anziane. Inadeguati non badano a se stessi, campano in semipiani di esistenza tutti loro; come vampiri autistici, succhiano l’osso dei loro ricordi: sono rinati e parlano del passato come se fosse ancora attivo; si convincono di avere figli giovani, ancora da sposare, si sentono importanti per qualcuno: insomma, si riprendono la loro giovinezza (giovinezza è: sentirsi utili al mondo).

Ecco l’elenco degli ospiti della casa di riposo, tutti catalogati, reimmaginati e naturalmente fotografati uno per uno dal Menecacci: il vecchio che chiede del figlio, il vecchio che aveva un gallo, la vecchia che preparerebbe la salsa tonnata ma le si è rotto il moulinex, il vecchio che ascoltando le previsioni del tempo simula competenza e pensa che possano verificarsi nuovi crolli, il vecchio che accoglie festosamente due angeli, la vecchia che era uguale a Elena Monti regina del cinema dei telefoni bianchi, il vecchio con le mani tremanti, la vecchia che stringendo al petto con la grazia di un giglio la bottiglia del latte attraversa la via, il vecchio che ha volato su un pallone con le ali, la vecchia che dice al Menecacci di essere sua zia, la vecchia che prima di portare il cucchiaio alla bocca pensa all’acqua danzante, il vecchio che dorme con il berretto in testa seduto al tavolo con i libri e il mappamondo e in mano la penna e gli occhiali.

Io e il Menecacci vorremmo fare un regalo a ognuno di quei vecchi così buoni, come facevamo da bambini, andandoli a trovare con le suore. A quei tempi pensavamo di sapere che cosa regalare ai vecchi, oggi non ne siamo più tanto sicuri; chissà, forse ne abbiamo perfino ucciso qualcuno: gli portavamo certi pandispagna, certi tobleroni. Morire in un delirio di kirschwasser e cioccolato dopo ore di degustazione, per eutanasia gastronomica. È giusto? Non si sa. Del resto ora non siamo più tanto convinti della bontà dei vecchi. Forse i vecchi di oggi non pensavano di vivere vite così lunghe, così sono rimasti un po’ interdetti, congelati in atteggiamenti immobilistici, e a noi figli della flessibilità questi ozymandias del posto fisso danno perfino un po’ sui nervi. In questo senso, e concordo con Venerandi¹, la morte del re dei quiz è un segno di speranza. In ogni modo, io e il Menecacci non siamo qui per perderci in regali, il nostro obiettivo è uno solo: dedicarci all’autobiografia di un uomo unico al mondo, raccolta dalla sua viva voce.

Questo signore non è né un premier afflitto da satiriasi né tantomeno una cariatide del rock, è uno di quei vecchi di una volta, schiena dritta, chioma bianca intorno a un volto grave, naso aquilino, occhi scuri. Ha vissuto in modo più o meno lucido la storia degli ultimi cento anni: laureato, ha avuto un ruolo accademico e politico; si è fatto una sua filosofia, e si è trovato nella posizione per esprimerla ai suoi concittadini. Insomma, una specie di Norberto Bobbio, ma senza la tessera dei GUF. Come potremmo chiamarlo? Glielo chiediamo. “Potete chiamarmi colonnello Krapp”, risponde. Bene, colonnello, cominciamo con le domande.

D: – Inizio citando un tuo articolo, Da dove esco io? Dove entro io?, uscito nel 19** sul numero monografico della rivista Opossum. Parli di Oik. Che significa per te questa città?

R: – Appena nato ho trovato subito lavoro, non era come adesso. Poi a oltre trent’anni ho vinto un concorso per un monumento all’indipendenza finnica e mi sono trasferito a Helsinki. Dopo, ho fondato il cinema finlandese, ma mi hanno rubato l’idea. Pensavo di essermi liberato di Oik, ma a novantotto anni non mi reggevo in piedi, mi hanno catturato e mi hanno trascinato fin qui in catene. Odio Oik e tutto ciò che rappresenta, è brutta come un accidente, come un ghiacciolo alla menta.

D: – Non stai facendo un po’ torto al cinema finlandese?

R: – Tutt’altro. Il cinema finlandese ha, comunque, una storia. Non è che si sappia molto, in Italia, del cinema finlandese.

D: – Andando a Helsinki, i tuoi contatti con gli intellettuali europei si sono rinforzati?

R: – Certo. Lyotard veniva. Gli preparavo la pasta, che gli piaceva tanto.

D: – A leggere il tuo articolo si direbbe però che tu abbia amato Oik alla follia.

R: – Sì, certo, un attaccamento a Oik c’era. Un attaccamento istintivo, come lo è ogni attività dell’id.

D: – E passavi anche tu le vacanze in Liguria, come Hemingway?

R: – Le passavo anch’io lì. Oggi sarebbe impossibile, non si trova più nemmeno un ombrellone.

(continua)

Diana Crane
(University of Pennsylvania)

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——————————————————————

Abstract

The subject of this paper is the relationship between cultural sociology and approaches to culture in other social science disciplines. What are the characteristics of the theoretical environment in which cultural sociology is operating? The paper begins by reviewing the literature on interdisciplinarity. Many authors argue that interdisciplinarity is increasing or should be increasing, but the general consensus is that disciplinary isolation is the norm. From this perspective, the relationships between disciplines can be understood in terms of trading zones in which fields in different disciplines have little in common, theoretically or empirically.  Interdisciplinary communication in ‘trading zones’ requires that participants laboriously construct a set of terms that permits them to exchange ideas.

Alternatively, I propose that clusters of fields in different disciplines are linked by free-floating paradigms. Participants in disciplines that share ‘free-floating paradigms’ are able to communicate with one another more readily. The paper presents evidence for the second interpretation, drawn from survey articles in disciplinary handbooks.  Disciplines and fields in which the study of culture draws from the same pool of paradigms and models and shares a set of lines of inquiry with cultural sociology include traditional disciplines, such as anthropology, communication, geography, history and psychology and interdisciplinary fields, such as cultural studies, communication, feminist theory, material culture, science studies, and visual culture. Interdisciplinary fields, particularly cultural studies, perform an important role in diffusing paradigms across disciplinary boundaries.  Free-floating paradigms are associated with the work of major theorists, such as Lévi-Strauss, Barthes, Foucault, Bourdieu, Lyotard, Baudrillard, Clifford Geertz, Bruno Latour, Adorno, Gramsci, and Habermas.

***My special thanks to Caitlin at Baker Academic for the review copy!***

• Paperback: 160 pages
• Publisher: Baker Academic & Brazos Press; 2nd edition (April 1, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 080102918X
• ISBN-13: 978-0801029189
• Baker
• Amazon

If a pastor or educated layman or undergraduate were to ask me where to start with getting a grip on “Postmodernism” and Christianity I would without question point them in the direction of the series put out by Baker Academic – now spanning an impressive 5 volumes – entitled “The Church and Postmodern Culture.”  We will be examining several of the volumes and I think that they shall prove quite valuable to the task at hand.

The first volume is authored by the Series editor James K. A. Smith.  What separates this book from say, Stanley Grenz’s intro is that Smith is a professional philosopher trained in Phenomenology.  Smith was an AG elder for some time but has since moved on and now teaches at Calvin College.  Unlike Grenz’s intro which looks into the various cultural manifestations of postmodernism, this book makes no attempt at comprehension.  There is an introductory chapter, a chapter on Derrida, a chapter on Lyotard, one on Foucault and a final chapter which points to “Radical Orthodoxy” as faithful way for the Church to incorporate postmodern insights to be more fully itself.

Each chapter begins with an illustration from a film, then moves into an examination of a particularly famous phrase from one of the three thinkers and attempts to move us past “bumper sticker” interpretations of these phrases.  Concluding each chapter is a section on “Taking X to Church” that moves us into praxis.

Smith sees himself as doing what Francis Schaeffer did for a previous generation.  Rather than thinking that “culture” gives birth to “ideas” both Smith and Schaeffer see “ideas” and academic ideas in particular as having the primary place of influence.  And so Smith intends to look at the issues with a critical depth and one never gets the feeling that they are reading a shallow critique of the issues.

After the introductory chapter Smith begins with an examination of Derrida.  More specifically the famous Derrida quote that “There is nothing outside the text.”  This phrase is often taken to mean that Derrida believes that there is nothing “real” or that there are just “ideas.”  This position would make it difficult to reconcile with Christian witness that there is a transcendent God prior to the world on whom the world is dependent for existence.

Smith rejects this interpretation and points to later Derrida to help fill in some gaps.  Derrida explained later that the phrase should be taken to mean that there is nothing outside context.  Smith points out that “On Grammatology” is in large part an extended dialogue with Jean-Jauques Rousseau’s essay “On the Origin of Language.”  Rousseau posits that language is a sort of lens or film clouding our understanding of what objects are.  That is, language distorts reality and the objectively real is something that must be known in ways that do not use language.  To this Derrida says “NEIN!” – Well actually he says something in French but you get the idea.

Against this Derrida says that there is no reality that is experienced without interpretation; without mediation.  Even seeing a cup “in the flesh” requires interpretation.  It is just that our extensive cultural conditioning does not allow for an easy look into our a priori understandings of how things are.

To illustrate this Smith uses the cartoon “The Little Mermaid.”  As a whole he takes the story as an evil that promotes consumerism and greed, but he makes swell use of the pericope of “The Dinglehopper.”  Not having any knowledge of how humans act apart from her information received from Scuttle the Seagull.  It is Scuttle who informs Ariel that a Fork is actually a Dinglehopper and is used to comb ones hair.  In an amusing scene once Ariel is finally ‘human,’ at a dinner she grabs a fork (or is it really a Dinglehopper?) and confidently begins to comb her hair.  Obviously this is “not” what a fork is for.

At this point one may not actually feel that Smith has made a convincing case for Christian appropriation of a Derridean insight because if “everything is an interpretation” then Holy Scripture and the Gospel is “merely” an interpretation.  Smith proposes that this is not as bad a thing as it initially seems to be and challenges readers to think about the  implications.

Instantly the Scriptures become a public and communal document thereby in a certain way legitimizing historical readings of Scripture against individualism and a spirit of non-accountability.  Which, at the same time does not shut off new readings in Community.

What then…?  Some might ask.  Isn’t there any way to “truly” and “objectively” “know” the truth of the Gospel?  In a word, no.  But, Smith points out, one can reduce the message of Salvation to “The Romans Road” or a series of logically symbolic propositions and teach them to a goat but that doesn’t produce saving faith.  Similarly, we should never have been expected to “know” the Gospel in such a fashion.

He finishes on a brief note supporting a “deconstructive” Church that refuses to close the text off from new readings.  He could have quoted the ole’ saying: “God hath yet more light to break forth from Holy Scripture.”

From Derrida Smith then examines Lyotard and his famous quote “Postmodernity is incredulity toward Meta-Narratives.”  Aptly using the film “O Brother Where Art Thou?” to begin the chapter Smith says: “Postmodernism can be understood as the erosion of confidence in the rational as sole guarantor and deliverer of truth, coupled with a deep suspicion of science – particularly modern science’s pretensious claims to an ultimate theory of everything.”

It is plain to see that we have not broken into a new “postmodern” world, rather postmodern suspicion is evinced by the landscape of LA with the curvaceous non-linear architechture of  Frank Gehry next to the crumbling and pathetic modern glass boxes and projects from the likes of Le Corbusier.  A few posts into the future I will examine Architecture as a key to understanding Modern and Postmoder.

It is right here though that the scared Christian (or scientist!) might wonder how we can possibly support such a claim.  Is not the Bible a “meta-narrative” of epic proportions covering everything from Creation to Apocalypse?

This is precisely where Smith insists that the bumper sticker reading of “meta-narrative’ is simply not correct in its diagnosis.  Smith believes that Lyotard’s “Metanarrative” is not concerned with the size of the narrative but the nature of the claims they make.  Modernity is the original “meta-narrative” because it tells a story and appeals to authority in “Universal Reason:”  Science, like any story, when pushed must give reasons of legitimization which it claims to find in “Reason,” an a-historical, trans-cultural, pre-linguistic, universally excessible “thing” called “Reason” to which any rational creature anywhere at anytime has direct and near infallible access provided they use objective means to search out their answers.

Another way of putting this is that modernity (because to the “modern” scientific, “real” science began post Enlightenments) appeals to authority outside of it’s own story.  Lyotard says it thus:  “I will use the term modern to designate any science that legitimates itself with reference to a metadiscourse of this kind making an explicit appeal to some grand narrative, such as the dialectics of Spirit [Hegel], the hermeneutics of meaning [Schleiermacher?], the emancipation of the rational [Kant] or working subject [Marx], or the creation of wealth [Adam Smith]…”

Against this Lyotard says that narratives are and should be auto-legitimizing needing no justification outside of their own story.  Calvin comes almost precisely near this by speaking about the self-authentication of Scripture.

This allows for the Church to be faith-full to its witness and need not sacrifice its story the many competing stories.

Note, that this is not a call for modernity or “science” to give up its narrative.  Rather it needs to recognize the narrative as such and seek to put some freakin’ clothes on.

Practically speaking this Christian giving-up of a meta-discourse should entail that we become a story-telling-Church again.  The/a Lectionary is a must to allow the Church to be governed by the whole Scriptures and not the whim and favorites of a lone pastor.  And in the final two chapters we will discuss in more depth the discipleship practices that these thinkers open up.

So! I got to thinking about art movements and realised that I wasn’t sure whether there were any contemporary movements apart from the Stuckists at the moment. Mostly I would define a movement as a group of artists consciously working together at a particular point in time or at least all adhering to a particular unifying aesthetic/theoretical concept.

Postmodernism would most likely say that movements are no longer possible, or at least no longer truly discernible – if the world has lost faith in all its metanarratives then striving towards an artistic truth is a bit pointless – however, since I quite enjoy a little rebellion against the art theory behemoth of postmodernism I decided to conduct my own not-hugely-academic investigation of current art movements. Hurrah!

The first that sprang to my mind (as mentioned earlier) was the Stuckists who have a manifesto and everything. The name came out of an argument between Tracy Emin and Billy Childish – the former told the latter his art was ’stuck’ – and the group of ‘Stuckists’ who emerged are pretty much characterised by their vocal opposition of stuff Charles Saatchi might like (not sure if this includes Nigella) and enthusiastic promotion of figurative over conceptual art. They also are unsurprisingly not keen on postmodernism either. (My own opinion of the Stuckists is that they spend an awful lot of time taking lazy potshots at bad art and sniping rather than furthering their own agenda by producing amazing figurative art. Being so blinkered as to assume all conceptual art is bad because you think Charles Saatchi is a knob is EQUALLY as stupid as paying hundreds of thousands for something with a YBA nametag.)

After that I got stuck (no pun intended) and consulted Wikipedia. The results were rather weak:

Massurrealism – a mash up of mass media and surealism – although James Seehafer who is credited with coming up with the name states categorically “I don’t think I should be credited with starting a new art movement”.

Street Art – the only unifying characteristics are that it takes place outside the gallery space and to a greater or lesser degree looks for social relevance. It’s more of a genre.

Digital/electronic/net art. Not specific enough to be a movement – it’s actually a choice of platform and what one actually creates using that platform varies wildly.

There are others but the same problem comes up again and again. They’re simply not cohesive or directed enough to form what I would call a movement. The closest of thos listed is possibly BioArt (which uses biotechnology to create artworks and raises all kinds of moral, ethical, and aesthetic dilemmas) but I would argue that BioArt is only even being referred to as a movement due to the relative lack of available technologies and legal, moral and ethical decisions. It doesn’t appear to take into account the hugely diverse output (theoretical and physical), plus none of the list of artists linked to the ‘movement’ self define as BioArtists. Again, I would say BioArt is a genre.

All this has led me round the houses and back to postmodernism. It seems to be that the only current movement in art which can be defined as a ‘Movement’ is the only one which explicitly rejects postmodernism. It seems quaint to have a manifesto now and naive – even infantile – to make sweeping generalisations like “Artists who don’t paint aren’t artists”.

To be a part of a movement is to have belief in a metanarrative – some totalising schema which informs the resulting artwork. Since at its core postmodernism rejects this (Lyotard states as much in his work La condition postmoderne: “Simplifying to the extreme, I define postmodern as incredulity towards metanarratives”) and since the artworld is mired in postmodern comment and critique I would argue that movements – certainly as we know them – may be on their way out.

On sait le rôle que la pensée et l’activité de Lyotard ont joué dans le groupe Socialisme ou barbarie dès les années 50, puis dans le mouvement 22 mars en 1968, avant d’intégrer ensuite le département de philosophie de l’Université de Paris VIII à Vincennes et se faire connaître internationalement (non sans confusion) sous les désignations de « philosophie du désir » ou, plus tard, de « philosophie postmoderne ».

_________________________

Passages de Jean-François Lyotard

14 octobre 2009 au 17 octobre 2009

Université de Paris 8 Vincennes à Saint-Denis

Rencontre internationale organisée par le département de philosophie de Paris 8,

Bruno Cany, Jacques Poulain et Plínio W. Prado, à l’occasion des 40 ans de « Vincennes ».

Rencontre organisée avec le soutien du Conseil scientifique de l’Université de Paris 8, du Laboratoire d’études et de recherches sur les logiques contemporaines de philosophie (LLCP) et de la Chaire UNESCO de Philosophie de la culture et des Institutions…

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Présentation du colloque

“Le présent colloque international, consacré à la pensée de Jean-François Lyotard, s’inscrit à plus d’un titre dans le cadre des manifestations du 40e anniversaire de l’Université de Vincennes qui auront lieu en automne de 2009 à Paris, sur fond de la situation critique que traverse l’université française aujourd’hui.

On sait le rôle que la pensée et l’activité de Lyotard ont joué dans le groupe Socialisme ou barbarie dès les années 50, puis dans le mouvement 22 mars en 1968, avant d’intégrer ensuite le département de philosophie de l’Université de Paris VIII à Vincennes et se faire connaître internationalement (non sans confusion) sous les désignations de « philosophie du désir » ou, plus tard, de « philosophie postmoderne ».

Plus précisément encore, on ne saurait oublier le rôle décisif que La condition postmoderne, son livre le plus connu (mais dont on oublie souvent qu’il s’agit d’un « rapport sur le savoir »), a joué dans la survie de l’Université de Paris VIII Vincennes à la fin des années 70, déjà aux prises alors avec le diktat de l’« optimisation des performances ». Critiquant à la fois la philosophie analytique et la pragmatique communicationnelle anglo-américaine et allemande, le livre ouvrait en même temps l’espace d’une discussion internationale, dans le climat de laquelle naîtrait quelques années plus tard le Collège international de philosophie.

Onze ans après la disparition de Jean-François Lyotard, et à l’occasion aujourd’hui des quarante ans de l’Université de Vincennes, ce colloque international se propose de dresser un état des lieux des travaux consacrés, un peu partout dans le monde, à la pensée de Lyotard.

On vise à contribuer à une compréhension à la fois plus large et plus fine de la teneur et du ton singuliers de cette pensée, ainsi que de l’enjeu, plus actuel que jamais, qui est le sien (et ce à l’encontre de son assimilation courante à l’amalgame de « la pensée française », « poststructurale » ou « postmoderne »). Ce sera en particulier l’opportunité d’expérimenter la force et la pertinence particulières de l’apport de cette pensée à l’intelligence de la situation contemporaine, Université comprise.

Le thème des « passages », qui témoigne d’une exigence fondamentale, indéfectible de la pensée, servira de fil conducteur au cours de ces journées de réflexion et de discussion.

En effet, bien que le penseur ait cherché à distinguer ce qu’il a nommé « la condition postmoderne » de « ce qui s’appelle postmodernité ou postmodernisme sur le marché des idéologies contemporaines », il reste que c’est au terme courant de « postmoderne » que son nom demeure généralement associé. Une telle réception, internationalement répandue, appelle une sévère révision. S’en tenir à cela reviendrait à oublier l’exigence dont fait preuve ici la pensée, son sens des différences et du « différend » (ce sens même que s’attache à occulter toute idéologie, à commencer par celle d’une « rationalité » qui dénierait le cas singulier, la venue de ce qui advient en tant qu’événement). Ce serait, en somme, faire tort à sa « responsabilité criticiste » intransigeante, qui est justement d’être judicieuse dans le différend.

Or c’est de cette exigence que témoigne foncièrement le thème des « passages ». Il atteste l’incommensurabilité des régimes des « phrases » dont est fait ce qu’on appelle « le langage » et leur agonistique (pour le dire dans le lexique du Différend, lequel prend source notamment dans une lecture de Kant révisée par celle de Wittgenstein). À commencer par l’incommensurabilité entre figure et discours, forme et concept, événement et signification.

Lyotard écrit qu’il a constaté après-coup avoir toujours tenté de réserver cela : « l’inaccordable », sous des noms (et des déplacements) divers – figural, hétérogénéité, différend, événement – qui jalonnent l’œuvre, depuis les premiers écrits esthétiques, voire politiques, jusqu’aux tout derniers textes.

Dès lors le thème des « passages », à résonance benjaminienne (mais revenant sous la plume de Lyotard à travers surtout le Kant du « jugement esthétique »), pourra s’entendre ici dans deux sens, au moins.

D’abord, les « passages » tels que Lyotard les élabore, les pense et les fraye tout au long de son œuvre (en prenant acte très tôt, depuis toujours peut-être, de « l’inaccordable »). Ce qui renverra à la figure du penseur comme « veilleur critique », ayant à s’orienter, sans règle préétablie, à travers la guerre civile des phrases.

Ensuite, les passages auxquels la pensée des « passages » de Lyotard elle-même n’aura cessé de donner lieu à travers le monde (sa réception, comme on dit), engendrant de nouvelles « phrases », animant d’autres actions, traversant la multiplicité des champs qu’elle aura explorés : politique, psychanalyse, judaïsme, pédagogie, sciences humaines, technosciences, peinture, cinéma, musique, littérature.

C’est à l’examen et à l’exploration de ces champs, suivant le fil conducteur des passages, que seront consacrées les journées de ce colloque.

On ne manquera pas de remarquer que cela ouvrira, à nouveaux frais, sur la problématique de l’affect, qui fera un retour insistant dans les derniers écrits. C’est que non seulement l’affect constitue la dernière boussole du « veilleur critique » (y compris, donc, en matière politique), mais en tant que ce qui excède constitutivement l’humanité de l’humain, il est décisif aussi pour l’élaboration d’une pensée de l’art ou de l’artistique, à l’écart de l’esthétique culturelle.

De plus, et par là même, il est crucial pour penser ce qui est finalement en jeu avec le développement technoscientifique, s’il est vrai que celui-ci exige des humains qu’ils se dépassent, se « déshumanisent » désormais, pour se mettre à la hauteur du défi de la complexité et de son rythme.

Ce qui ouvre en grand la question du « conflit des inhumanités », celle du système et celle, native, constitutive de l’humain.”

Plínio W. Prado, Université de Paris VIII Vincennes à St Denis, Département de philosophie

E-mail : plinio.prado@univ-paris8.fr

Programme du colloque

Mercredi 14 Octobre

=> Ouverture Lyotard aujourd’hui

• Plínio Prado, Paris 8 : « D’un Il faut y aller qui ne dit pas où »
• René Schérer, Paris 8 : Jean-François à fleur de peau
• Vladimir Safatle, Université de São Paulo : Pour une critique de l’économie libidinale : retour sur les rapports de Lyotard et de la psychanalyse
• Modérateur : Bruno Cany, Paris 8

=> Les passages

• Amparo Vega, Paris 8, Bogota : Des cas et des passages d’enchaînement
• Denis Viennet, Paris 8, Bruyères : Un passage de ce qui ne passe pas : Lyotard et l’enfance de l’âme
• Paulette Kayser, Paris : Inarticulée… passage d’une sensation sans âge
• Modérateur : Plínio Prado, Paris 8

Jeudi 15 Octobre

=> La justice postmoderne

• Marcelo Raffin, Buenos Aires : Liberté, identité et assujettissement : la capture de la subjectivité dans les politiques des disparitions et les apories de l’Etat de droit
• Wang Xiaosheng, Guangzhou : Universal Pragmatics or Special Pragmatics: on Habermas and Lyotard’s conceptions of justice
• Liu Zhuohong, Guangzhou : On Lyotard’s Thought of discursive justice
• Modérateur : Jacques Poulain, Paris 8

=> Destins du « postmoderne »

• Gaëlle Bernard, Lille 3 : Une critique de la raison altruiste : résistance ou souveraineté ?
• Alberto Gualandi, Urbino : Relativisme postmoderne et exercice du jugement
• Arild Utaker, Université de Bergen : « La condition postmoderne » 30 ans après
• Modérateur : Marcelo Raffin, Buenos Aires

Vendredi 16 Octobre

=> L’art du pragmatique

• Vicente Ulive Schnell, Paris 8, Caracas : La critique des théories des actes de parole par Jean-François Lyotard
• Irma Angue Medoux, Paris 8, Libreville : Une critique pragmatique du postmoderne : Richard Rorty critique de Jean-François Lyotard
• Eliane Beaufils, Strasbourg : Avatars du théâtre postmoderne
• Modérateur : Amparo Vega, Bogota

=> L’art du politique

• Bruno Cany, Paris 8 : Le philosophe artiste et la sophistique
• Adrian Navigante, Darmstadt : Le sublime et l’enthousiasme chez JF Lyotard : la relation entre l’esthétique et le politique
• René Schérer, Paris 8 : Un juste
• Modérateur : Vicente Ulive Schnell, Paris 8, Caracas

Samedi 17 Octobre

=> Ouvertures paralogiques

• Jacques Poulain, Paris 8 : Le passage Jean-François Lyotard
• Plínio Prado, Paris 8 : L’impasse « esthétique » comme passage. Dérive à partir de Wittgenstein et Freud
• Modérateur : Bruno Cany, Paris 8

Table ronde : voies, passages, ouvertures

Pour davantage de renseignements, vous pouvez télécharger l’affiche et le programme du colloque :

• Lyotard_Affiche_-_Copie.pdf
• Lyotard_Argument-prog.pdf

ou consulter la page du site calenda consacré au colloque : http://calenda.revues.org/nouvelle14669.html

enfin vous pouvez contacter :

• Plínio W. PRADO
  courriel : plinio.prado@univ-paris8.fr

• Université de Paris VIII – Département de philosophie 2, rue de la Liberté 93526 – SAINT-DENIS cedex 02 tél : 01 49 40 66 13

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Cet article a été construit à partir des 2 sources suivantes :

• « Passages de Jean-François Lyotard », Colloque, Calenda, publié le lundi 12 octobre 2009, http://calenda.revues.org/nouvelle14669.html, publié le lundi 12 octobre 2009 par Marie Pellen
• Atelier Philosophie

I remember the second time I visited SM City Iloilo this year quite vividly for the simple reason that I heard a familiar tune playing over the mall’s intercom. I was with my two titas and their baby boy when we noticed Inang Laya’s song “Babae” reverberating across the mall interior.

I was way younger when I first listened to the song. I cannot recall the circumstances of those childhood moments anymore but I can recollect the song’s melody just fine anytime. I was older when I came across the song again and that was also the time when I learned the lyrics:

“Babae”

By Inang Laya

Kayo ba ang mga Maria Clara
Mga Hule at mga Sisa
Na di maruning na lumaban?
Kaapiha’y bakit iniluluha?
Mga babae, kayo ba’y sadyang mahina?

Kayo ba ang mga Cinderella
Na lalake, ang tanging pag-asa?
Kayo nga ba ang mga Nena
Na katawan ay ibinebenta?
Mga babae, kayo ba’y sadyang pang-kama?

Ang ating isip ay buksan
At lipuna’y pag-aralan,
Ang nahubog ninyong isipan
At tanggaping kayo’y mga libangan
Mga babae, ito nga ba’y kapalaran?

Bakit ba mayroong mga Gabriela
Mga Teresa at Tandang Sora
Na di umasa sa luha’t awa?
Sila’y nagsipaghawak ng sandata
Nakilaban, ang mithiin ay lumaya.

Bakit ba mayrong mga Lisa
Mga Liliosa at mga Lorena
Na di natakot makibaka
At ngayo’y marami nang kasama?
Mga babae, ang mithiin ay lumaya!

“Women hold half the sky,” Mao once said. But in a society like the Philippines, women are subjected to the double oppression, among others, of class and sex. “Babae,” a favorite during women’s month commemoration affairs during March and protest actions involving women’s issues, is a song that problematizes the gender role assigned by the social order to women since their childhood.

Following Simone de Beauvoir’s saying that “one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman” [1], Inang Laya questions the idea that a woman is by essence weak (“Mga babae, kayo ba’y sadyang mahina?”), dependent on men (“Kayo ba ang mga Cinderella / Na lalake, ang tanging pag-asa?”), and a mere object of pleasure in bed (“Mga babae, kayo ba’y sadyang pang-kama?”).

Opposing the identity reinforced by dominant patriarchal institutions like the family, education, the law, and the media, the song advances the alternative image of the woman aspiring for liberation (“Mga babae, ang mithiin ay lumaya!”). Citing the example of heroines from Philippine history like Gabriela, Teresa and Tandang Sora as well as women martyrs in the ongoing people’s war in the countryside like Lisa, Liliosa, and Lorena, the song challenges the stereotype of women as represented in Philippine literature by the figures of Maria Claras, Hule, and Sisas.

But is this emancipation simply the discarding of the traditional view of the essential domestic woman for the “sexually-liberated” woman of the West? Capitalism dissolves women, in the words of Jean-Francois Lyotard,

into the male cycle, integrated either as workers into the production of commodities, or as mothers into the reproduction of labor power, or again, as commodities; themselves (cover-girls, prostitutes of mass media, hostesses of human relations), or even as administrators of capital (managerial functions). [2]

The problem therefore, Lyotard contends, “is not to safeguard a difference of sex against a movement towards homologation imposed by capital. The ‘difference between the sexes’ is no more exempt from masculine imperialism than its opposite…” [3]

In the Philippine context, the domination of foreign monopoly capital – and the consequent rape of our natural and human resources by foreign corporations and dislocation of both urban and rural communities – have led to a situation where Filipina women suffer exploitative and abusive work conditions to support themselves and their families. The Philippines has become the world’s top exporter of women with the sector comprising the bulk of labor migration abroad. Filipina women are turned into abused domestic helpers, poorly paid factory workers, and sex trade victims. [4]

These are the realities that the song, “Babae,” calls on to study and question (“Ang ating isip ay buksan / At lipuna’y pag-aralan”). Ultimately, Inang Laya’s song goes to the end with the message that gender roles, being social constructs resulting from the interplay of power relations in a particular historical juncture, are also arenas for struggle.

The song, moreover, demonstrates that Filipina women are not simply oppressed but have been actively participating in movements that not only seek empowerment for their sector but for other marginalized groups as well (“Sila’y nagsipaghawak ng sandata / Nakilaban, ang mithiin ay lumaya”). ■

[1] Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. by H.M. Parshley, New York: Vintage Books, 1989 (1949), p. 267.

[2] Jean-Francois Lyotard, “One of the Things at Stake in Women’s Struggles,” trans. by Deborah J. Clarke with Winifred Woodhull and John Mowitt, in The Lyotard Reader, edited by Andrew Benjamin, Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1989, p.116.

[3] Ibid, p.117.

[4] “The Purple Rose Campaign,” in the Gabriela Women’s Party Website, Online, Internet, 28 September 2008.

I’m going to take a post or two to talk about postmodernism.  At first, I want to talk about it in a general sort of way, painting in broad strokes how I understand postmodernism as a historical movement.  This will probably seem a little out of place here on this blog, but bear with me, it will circle back around to religion in a subsequent post.

So, where does postmodernism begin?  Let’s start with Lyotard’s famous formulation of postmodernism as the distrust of grand metanarratives.  It’s short and bland.  Postmodernism looks back over the major ideological movements of the 20th century with a sense of fatigue.  They all promised a better world but ended up delivering us over to one of the bloodiest and nastiest centuries ever.

Another politician / revolutionary / artist / etc. comes along with an idea they think will change everything for the better and, well, what does the postmodernist do?  Give them a real cagey look and start looking for the door.

This allies postmodernism with the ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’ that Foucault delineated.  However, it’s important to note that postmodernism isn’t exactly identical with this suspicion.  We need to examine this hermeneutics and come to terms with it before we have a solid appreciation for the relationship between postmodern distrust and this suspicion.

When Foucault details its origins, he points out three major figures: Nietzsche, Freud, and Marx.  They are all roughly contemporary with each other and all concerned with how the reasons given for undertaking an action are not identical with the actual motivations driving the action.

[I'm going to use both these terms in a technical sense throughout.  When I talk about reasons, I'm going to mean what people say when asked why they are doing something.  When I use the word 'motivation,' I'm going to be referring to the set of ideas and circumstances that explain why they are doing something.  Driving a wedge between motivations and reasons is one of the cornerstones of this hermeneutics of suspicion.]

These figures and this attitude are intertwined with modernism.  Each of these thinkers has a powerful moral vision, and suggests, each after their fashion, ways in which the true motivations for behavior can be (1)unearthed and (2) properly managed for the betterment of society.

Each of these figures also struggles with a deep pessimism, a concern that society won’t come to terms with its motivations and so remain unhealthy and deluded.  But, this pessimism forms an integral part of their moral vision.  Were the costs of failure not so high, they would not struggle so mightily to discover our motivations and correct our reasons.

Now, most of us are comfortable with the idea that we don’t always know exactly why we do something, that there are motivations we aren’t always able to articulate into reasons for our behavior.  These hermeneuticists go one step further, though, in suggesting that our motivations are the ‘real’ cause of our behavior and our reasons are the result of deliberate lies or ignorance.

Actually, they go one step further than that.  Not only do we not address our actual motivations in giving reasons, they say, but there are only a small set of motivations driving us which often bear little resemblance to our reasons.

In short, each delineate a small set of motivations as the real cause of our behavior, and so are led to believe that you can establish a thorough science of human behavior and society by focusing upon them.  Nietzsche is a bit of an outlier, because in most cases his pessimism and skepticism about our ability to deal with our motivations greatly exceeds his optimism about being able to manipulate them.

Politically, these are explosive ideas.  If our reasons are inaccurate and our motivations are simple, politics can be reordered to properly address motivations and bypass the failed explanations contained in our reasons.  This notion fuels much of modernism.  Modernism can be thought of as the effort to come to terms with this uncomfortable ‘truth’ about our behavior.

Aesthetic modernism’s love of shock effects, for example, have their root in a desire to jar the spectator from the realm of their (false) reasons and into a confrontation with the ‘true’ reality of their motivations.

Now, even with our big three hermeneuticists of suspicion, there is a good deal of divergence as to what the content of our hidden motivations actually are.  Power, resource accumulation, sexuality all get talked about. They are basic and powerful forces with which all of us have experience.  As such, it is not so difficult to conceive of them as primary in some fundamental way.

We should be careful, too, about getting fixated on this particular trinity.  The more ‘American’ ideology of free market capitalism and rational choice theory is not so different than communism or fascism on this point.  It varies primarily on the method of manipulation.  It shares a sense of the difference between motivations and reasons.

Let me not wander so far afield, though.  The point that needs to be made is this: the metanarratives that postmodernism distrusts are rooted in the hermeneutics of suspicion.  The distrust of postmodernism is not the suspicion of the early 20th century.  Quite the opposite, postmodernism involves the distrust of suspicion.

Here is where it gets really messy, though.  Postmodernism, for all its distrust of the hermeneutics of suspicion, has tended to forward its agenda by turning the tools of suspicion back upon those hermeneuticists who employ them.

The suspicious moderns weren’t amoral.  They had clear ideas about what an ideal world would look like.  They thought that by coming to terms with real human motivations, they could manipulate those motivations to create a more just society.  By their own account, however, the values they endorsed were just reasons, not genuine motivations.  They had to be ‘really’ motivated by the same things they were trying to manipulate (sex, power, capital).

The postmoderns leap upon this faultline and work it hard (just like the modernists; e.g. ‘the Marxist isn’t noble-minded, but furthering a new arrangement of capital that is to their benefit, not to the benefit of all’).  They often immerse themselves in the ideas and techniques of the moderns.

Moreover, like the moderns, they are often motivated by their moral sense of how things have gone wrong and how they need to be set right again.  Observing the failure of modern agendas, they often come to be profoundly cynical about the existence of real motivations.

Motivations become just one more set of reasons people give.  At its most articulate, you find figures like Derrida who preserve the ‘hidden’ motivations only by making them inscrutable.

The distrust becomes an all-encompassing suspicion that dissolves all reason-giving *and* undermines the notion that there are motivations that lie beneath that reason-giving.  These sort of postmoderns replace the searching modern pessimism with a jaded postmodern cynicism.  They replace grim hope with aggressive despair.  We’ll call this political postmodernism.

There is a minor chord in this political postmodernism that sees an opportunity in this moment.  Freed from the gaze of suspicion and its implicit demand to make life a moral project, these postmoderns emphasize liberation and freedom.  Foreshadowed in Nietzsche’s brighter moods, they replace the demands of grim hope with a willful playfulness, a mischievous demand to do away with demands.

In aesthetic postmodernism, the modern hunger for the new world veers close to becoming a desire for titillation without transformation.  Instead of Pound’s strident ‘Make it new,’ we get something close to the parody of postmodernism from The Simpsons (as Moe eloquently says in one episode, “It’s postmodern…weird for the sake of weird”).

In this, we can see some aspects of modernist art itself as postmodern before the letter.  A love for shock effects to reveal truth can easily slip toward a love of shock for itself.  Once the faith in the true motivation falters, the shock becomes a technical question only, of giving the sense of revelation without the content of it.

Both the minor and major chords of this postmodernism do not do away with the sense of morality, they do much to neutralize it and minimize it, for fear that a moral demand taken to its limit will fall back into the destructive ideology of modernism.

And herein lies the real weakness of differentiating postmodernism from modernism.  Rather than a separate thing, postmodernism is more like a withered modernism.  It emerges from the same moral vision and often utilizes the same techniques for carrying it out, but directs its violence against itself more often than not.

It is inward, rather than outward.  It makes strident moral claims from time to time, but qualifies them with a transcendental doubt.

I didn’t go through all of this just to come to the end and discard the historical lessons.  There is a moral dimension to modernism and postmodernism that I want to disentangle from the rest of the conceptual apparatus.

The suspicion that reasons and motivations are non-identical is good, healthy.  The conviction that we can get beyond that non-identity to summarize the basic motivations of a community, much less of a species, is much less so.  It assumes a too-tidy overlap between our concepts and the context with which they interact.

I’ll pick that up next time.

“Dio è morto, Marx è morto… e anch’io oggi non mi sento molto bene” diceva profeticamente Woody Allen; uno dei temi principe della riflessione novecentesca è quello della crisi, della morte, del tramonto della civiltà; da Spengler ad Huizinga, da Freud ad Heidegger, fino ad arrivare ai teorici della post-modernità, i Foucault, i Derrida, i Lyotard, tutti si esercitano intorno a queste speculazioni sulla fine. Ora. Che Dio esista o meno, onestamente poco me ne importa. Tanto piu’ che, se anche esso avesse tra i suoi attributi quello dell’esistenza, quello che ci riguarda è l’idea che noi ce ne facciamo, non il suo reale contenuto.

Ma so bene che questi discorsi vi rompono il cazzo; non lo dite a me, mi rompe solo l’idea di dover pensare e parlare di queste cose; quasi mi annoio da solo! Quindi, di che parliamo? Penso che qualcosa di divertente ce l’abbiate in mente, ed ha sicuramente a che fare con tette enormi, fighe pelose, cazzi giganti e via dicendo. Ah, brutti maniaci che non siete altro! Tutti dal prete a confessarvi vi dovrei mandare (e tu, direte voi? No, io sono casto a conti fatti dal ’91!)

Si, che se c’è un argomento che mette tutti d’accordo circa l’interesse che vi è su investito, questo è proprio il sesso; non so voi, ma ogni volta che mi trovo con gli amici, non c’è una volta, dico una, che non si finisca a parlare di sesso; sempre a parlare di quello che si fa 12 seghe giornaliere, del tale che ce l’ha di 27 cm ( e chi sarà mai? Scrivetemi in privato ed il mistero avrà risposta! ), di quell’altro che è ricchione; di chi scopa, di chi non scopa, di quanto si scopa, di come si scopa; di quanto possa esser godurioso un bocchino fatto per bene ecc. ; insomma, tutto ruota intorno a quello; continua ad esserci, nonostante l’ apparenza  mostri una società disinibita e libertina, ove la trasgressione ha perso quasi di significato nel momento in cui è divenuta normalità, dove orgie, sadomaso, feticismo  e quant’altro, non fanno piu’ notizia per quanto essi sono oramai diffusi; dove in ogni pubblicità che si rispetti è cosa ovvia l’esaltazione degli oggetti tramite la giustapposizioni di messaggi sessuali, mediante perlopiu’ i corpi di bele ragazze; dove non c’è trasmissione che si rispetti che non abbia la sua valetta doverosamente svestita; ebbene, in questo tripudio di sesso, i discorsi sul sesso, invece d’esser diventati banali, noiosi, in quanto presenti con una costanza che ad un occhio attento risulterà sconcertante,  sono invece in proliferazione continua; se ne parla ossessivamente, le battute che fanno ridere sono sempre quelle sconce. Perchè mi chiedo, perchè?

Continua

Il Professore

Almost all philosophers are very conservative concerning modern art. They all look more than 10 years back towards the art world. Even the most revolutionary philosophers have the same taste as the average grey haired museum visitor on a rainy Tuesday morning. Deleuze and Lyotard refer towards Bacon, Buren and Newmann while they were writing in the late eighties; Adorno couldn’t accept jazz music in the sixties and Baudrillard makes nostalgic pictures. Even the cultural tastes of Derrida, Žižek and Sloterdijk are at least traditional. I’m the last person on earth who wants to challenge the taste of people who aren’t professionally working in the art field but the point is that all these philosophers are quite successful in aesthetic theory and therefore influences thousands of art students, artists, curators etc. This is especially the case if Nicolas Bourriaud’s theory about the growing importance of Post-production is true.

Jacques Rancière is besides Georges Bataille an exception to the rule. The latter wrote about the revolutionary potential of surrealism in the thirties while it was on its top (even though he was not accepted by the surrealist movement), an exercise Guy Debord would later do in the fifties. Even though he is in his late sixties, Rancière is a contemporary philosopher who makes claims about art. He even brings in a new aesthetic theory  which is based on Lyotard’s later work which could work well with new ways of making art which keeps a revolutionary principle in it. As an artist it’s essential to keep the revolutionary potential in the artwork because otherwise it will fall prey to bureaucrats who will castrate artists and push them as cheap soldiers to upgrade neighbourhoods…as a joker at the king’s court.

Los artistas han llegado a constituirse como clase pedante por excelencia. Junto con la clase política, se presentan como los nuevos afortunados del neocapitalismo, los que pueden afirmar con vehemencia que la vida no tendría sentido sin ellos. Ambos se han dado de la mano y han consagrado el posmodernismo, situación que nadie entiende pero que suena bien como etiqueta por la única razón de que vende, exhibiendo de esta manera la terrible mentira en que nos encontramos. Tarántula, por favor:

Canción de Tarántula

¿Qué pensáis ahora? Si aún creeis que los artistas son gente muy noble, ilustremos su falsedad a partir de algunas ideas del propio filósofo Lyotard, quien cree que el arte posmoderno se ha convertido en la solución transvanguardista, de carácter paródico y ecléctico, con el fin de derrotar los fundamentos de las vanguardias de principios de siglo, o sea los de la experimentación. El principal valor del posmodernismo es el dinero, el éxito, y de ahí que su proclama sea tan explícita: qué-más-da, con tal de conseguir el preciado metal. A falta de criterios estéticos, no queda más valoración que la de la máxima rentabilidad, y por eso una obra se mide únicamente en función de una determinada demanda, ante un determinado público, ante un determinado tipo de consumidor.

Se trata, por lo tanto, de un arte que no actúa sino que se complace que el mundo la admire, como si fuera una loca metida encima del escenario, sin actitud ni afrenta. Lyotard se olvida, pero, que el arte no ha sido nada más que eso y que las vanguardias como experimentación, lejos de la relajación posmodernista, no fue más que la excepción que confirma el hecho. Sería imprescindible cambiar el propio concepto de arte, o sencillamente que desapareciera de la faz terrestre, porque apesta. Hablemos de pintura, escultura, cerámica, música, o de culquier otra actividad, acción, mientras que no sea arte, concepto que atonta al personal. “Métete los mitos en el culo” y si alguien vieses que fuere de artista, haz lo siguiente: métele, “métele a un artista”. Tarántula tiene razón: “la policía sí que es arte”, porque ellos llevan la porra, no el pincel, y con ella pueden aporrear, actuar, gran función que el pincel perdió en algún recoveco.

Afegim aquí una informació previa de les properes reunions del seminari per tal de que els participants puguin veure els textos proposats i recordin els dies de les reunions.

Dissabte, 21 de novembre de 2009
Jean Baudrillard (PDF 130 kB)

Selecció http://www.gep21.org/tpk/baudrillard-selec.pdf

Dissabte, 19 de desembre de 2009
 Jean-François Lyotard (PDF 11 MB)

Selecció http://www.gep21.org/tpk/lyotard-selec.pdf
Dissabte, 16 de gener de 2010
Rosalind Kraus (PDF 8 MB)

Selecció http://www.gep21.org/tpk/krauss-selec.pdf

Més endavant us farem arribar més informació.

Shackled Motherhood.
Producer: Chandan Gupta
Documentary. English.
20′37″
EMRC, Indore.
2005.

“I would like to call a differend the case where the plantiff is divested of the means to argue and becomes for that reason a victim.

This side of the bars

If the addressor, the addressee, and the sense of the testimony are neutralized, everything takes place as if there were no damages. A case of differend between two parties takes place when the regulation of the conflict that opposes them is done in the idiom of one of the parties while the wrong suffered by the other is not signified in that idiom.” [Lyotard, Jean-François (1988). The Differend: Phrases in Dispute. University of Minnesota Press. pp. 9.]

Here is a case of differend where the party is single. Convicted women are privileged to keep their children under six years with them in prison cells. Some women do not accept this privilege as it would brand their children permanently as jail-birds. It is always the children who pay for the crimes of their mothers — when with their mothers, their freedom is restricted, outside the prison they grow in separation.

Despite government’s senitivity — special allowance for food and clothing besides medical aid — the problem remains unresolved. Kind officials and concerned citizens chip in to mitigate the misery, but even best efforts do not bring normalcy in life of the children.

So how does Meillassoux and Brassier’s non-correlative realism return us to Werner Herzog and his film Encounters at the End of the World? Throughout Herzog’s films he charts the phenomenal dreaming of his subjects, whose visions cannot be made commensurate to the vast extensity of nature, the super-immensity of which exceeds their imagination. This is certainly noted by Deleuze in Cinema 1 in the chapter ‘The Figures of Large and Small in Herzog’. In each of Herzog’s films we encounter ‘a man who is larger than life who frequents a milieu which is itself larger than life, and dreams up an action as great as the milieu’ [C1, p.184] These figures, who are often marked by madness, enact super-feats in an attempt to inflate their hallucinatory dreams to match the expanse of boundless reality; Aguirre in the virgin Amazon; the jungle which serves as Fitzcarraldo’s opera-house; Stroszek’s America; the prophet Mühlhiasl’s mountain; the small-brained Kaspar Hauser’s inquiry into God in the garden; the rapturous ecstasy of the ski-flyer Steiner; Treadwell’s wilderness and so forth. In each case Herzog’s ‘small’ characters –– literally small in Even Dwarves Start Small –– inflate their hallucinations, so that ‘the Large is realized as a pure Idea, in the double nature of landscapes and actions’ [C1, p. 184]. Here visions are synonymous with the caesura of the apocalyptic Idea. Through this characterization Deleuze recognizes Herzog as a filmmaker of the Kantian sublime, his films being an account of how the ‘small enters into a relationship with the Large’ [C1, p.185]. Subsequently, Herzog is rightly identified as the ‘most metaphysical filmmaker’ –– he himself claims to be a filmaker of the ecstactic truth. Herzog’s subjects are dwarfed by this sublime, it enfeebles them, despite their attempts to adequate their visions with the cosmic limits of reality. More often than not, the subject’s idealist thought-world cannot match unbounded nature, resulting in madness, death or a heroic action that sublimates this relationship –– in many cases affirmation is insufficient. For Kant, the sublime is the ‘wide blue yonder’, the substrate of supersensible reality foreclosed to our faculties and beyond experience: a glimpse of the land of silence and darkness. This is the numinous feeling of the sublime experienced by Herzog’s visionaries, the ‘Cathedral’[1] that the McMurdo ice-divers refer to when they swim beneath the polar ice of the Antarctic. As the visionary William Blake describes it in Auguries of Innocence:

To see the world in a grain of sand and a heaven in a wild flower, hold infinity in the palm of your hand and eternity in an hour. [‘To See a World…’, fragment from Auguries of Innocence 1803]

This unbounded infinity encountered in nature dwarves us, making us feel physically frail, since it is incommensurate with our powers of imagination. This is especially pronounced since, in a Darwinian sense, we are not equipped by evolution to track the essential nature of things. Under such an understanding representation must necessarily return for the subject, in order to cope with the incongruence of the mind and reality, in order to ascribe formlessness a cognizable form. As a result, we could say that the conditions of representation are secreted by the world and reality generates representation in a degenerate form (i.e. metaphor, recognition, identification, equivalence, etc). However, the sublime does allow us to intuit that there is more to reality than the sensorial and the imaginative, beyond our phenomenal ideality. Yet whereas Kant had an inadequate mathematical understanding of infinity, the paradox of infinity has been completed in Cantor’s set theory and made coherent by Meillassoux, making the unthinkable immensity of chaotic reality intelligible to us as the transfinite. Spinoza would have it that the secret of joy is to love something infinite, much like Nietzsche’s affirmation of the eternal return, but joy’s transcendence should not be privileged over woe, since joy is merely the mask for the meaningless and painful condition of the world. Kant correctly realizes that whilst our relation to the sublime can effectuate joy, more often than not it is accompanied by horror[2]. Here we detect a contradictory double economy of the sublime; the differend as Lyotard names it. [3] This negative pleasure, the dissonant tension that we feel in the thrall of the thunderstorm, is experienced by even the most rational scientists in Encounters at the End of the World, who doubly understand the consequences of our relationship to the annihilatory power of the real, both through subjection and in scientifically objective terms. This is precisely the treatment that the theme of the sublime receives in German romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich’s painting Polar Sea (The Destroyed Hope) (1824) in which double-power of beauty and terror are at odds. It is this thrilling dread that Herzog seems to feel lies beneath even the most positivist gloss, which fills him with the suspicion that motivates his enquiry and informs his aesthetic. Despite this, Herzog is vocal in his affinity for the anecdote about Martin Luther, wherein the theologian was asked what he would do if he knew the world was ending tomorrow, to which he replied: ‘I would plant an apple tree today’. However, is this not merely a pragmatic acceptance that the decontraction of death establishes the possibility of being; a ‘purposelessness, which compels all purposefulness’?

Herzog is rightfully suspicious of the idealism and positive vitalism that Stefan Pashov subscribes to at the beginning of Encounters at the End of the World, since such totalizing thought-worlds subordinate the mindless ‘distinct objects’ of reality to the human consciousness. Such exorbitant claims are tantamount to an anthropocentric imperialism that skews man’s position in relation to alien nature; a result of mankind’s misplaced confidence in the consonance of its own thought. In this regard, Herzog is keen to deride the folly of the polar explorer Ernest Shackleton and those dreamers who gaze upon the glacially indifferent real and believe we can ultimately master such a superior force. Amusingly, Herzog dramatizes this folly with the depiction of a ‘deranged’ penguin that cannot be persuaded from heading into the interior of the continent and towards certain death. It is here we find an analogy for the delusional character of strong correlationism, exemplified by Hegel’s totalitarianism of the Idea –– the suspicion of which led Marx to his materialist inversion. As Marx observes with regard to Hegel’s methodology in Grundrisse:

[…] Hegel fell into the illusion of conceiving the real as the product of thought concentrating itself, probing its own depths, and unfolding itself out of itself, by itself, whereas the rising from the abstract to the concrete is only the way by which thought appropriates the concrete [and] reproduces it as concrete in the mind. [GR, p.101]

Accordingly, we can say that idealism is the vice of post-Kantian thought, which suffers from a pathological and delusional obsession with the concretization of the correlation –– the ‘philosopher’s syndrome’. Yet whilst Marx and Engels’ dialectical materialism might be assumed to be ‘scientifically’ insufficient to truly overthrow Hegelian absolutism, they and the other philosophers of suspicion, including Nietzsche and Freud, were right to view such philosophical solipsism skeptically. Meillassoux deems these thinkers philosophical secessionists:

Schopenhauer said that solipsism was a fortress impossible to penetrate, but also pointless to attack, since it is empty. Solipsism is a philosophy that no one can refute, but also one that no one can believe. So let’s leave the fortress as it is, and let’s explore the world in all its vastness! [CVIII, p. 423]

Consequently, suspicion of Hegelian idealism only permitted philosophy to step out of the circle of correlation and into the circle of reflection, abstaining from a proper engagement with idealism completely. However, reflection still remained shadowed by enobling idealism. This is why Meillassoux seeks to destroy correlative philosophy from within through the necessity of contingency and why Brassier seeks to annihilate it through a scientific determination-in-the-last-instance. So how might the aggrandizing visions of Herzog’s principle characters be better described by neuroscience, supplemented by the ‘speculative armature’ of metaphysics in a manner that is commensurate with realism proper?

In his book Being No One philosopher of the mind Thomas Metzinger draws heavily on representationalist and functionalist analysis, arguing that no such things as selves exist: ‘nobody has ever had or was a self’. We merely experience a phenomenal self-model (PSM), or variety of selves as they appear in conscious experience; not an entity or essential being, but a process that Metzinger states is the content of a ‘transparent self-model’. This clearly finds harmony with the Badiou’s ontology of subtraction, which we are now able to ratify transcendentally through Laruelle. Metzinger states that neuroscience is approaching a stage at which it can provide specific answers regarding the self-presentational model, or ‘user illusion’ of first-person reality as we experience it, which has consequences for intentionality: ‘The content of the PSM is the content of the conscious self: your current bodily sensations, your present emotional situation, plus all the contents of your phenomenally experienced cognitive processing.’ [BNO, p. 299] Accordingly, the content of the PSM constitutes a metaphorical self that you intuitively experience as you, a system of representation that allows goal-directed deliberate actions. The PSM is valuable delusion that grants us conscious action, yet is absent in unconscious automatic responses to motor-sensory stimuli (e.g. catching a ball thrown in our direction or the ‘telepathic’ group movement of a flock of starlings). This engenders formidable confusion for the folk-psychological phenomenal subject, or self we experience as a unitary whole:

It endows our mental space with two highly interesting structural characteristics: centeredness and perspectivalness. As long as there is a phenomenal self our conscious model of the world is a functionally centred model and usually tied to what in philosophy of the mind is called the “first-person” perspective. [BNO, p. 303]

This is precisely the notion that forms the kernel of most epistemological and metaphysical difficulties in philosophy. Metzinger goes on to say that this centering generates an ‘epistemic asymmetry’ between the recognition of conscious states from the first-person to third-person perspective. This appears to be highly reminiscent of Heidegger’s inability to find being in general coextensive with the specific mineness of Dasein. For Metzinger, the mineness of selfhood that the PSM experiences –– notably in the act of introspective thought –– cannot conclusively be said to belong to one entity. Moreover, the distribution of this property in space can vary considerably and in heightened mental states this phenomenal quality of mineness can exceed the bounds of the physical body, leading to deviant and disembodied self-models.

The florid schizophrenic experiences many extreme and disorientating states of mind, including radical depersonalization in which consciously experienced thoughts are no longer their own; just as Woyzeck experiences when he feels the Earth rise up by touching the wood he is chopping. The schizoid self-model becomes dissociated from the user of the PSM, just as people experience with phantom limbs, alien-hand syndrome or unilateral hemi-neglect (‘my leg is not my own’). Literally, their mind no longer belongs to them and they might even say: ‘My mind is no longer mine’; as if it were an alien appendage. They lose the subjective embodiment or mineness that they are accustomed to. A sense of ownership of mind is essential to the subject’s orderly function and if the subject cannot integrate his/her own self-model with their own cognitive processes they will experience serious depersonalization. Here the entire system of representation may in fact be lost. [4] The result is an altered state of consciousness not of their volition. They might say to a doctor, ‘I am a robot’ or, ‘my volitional acts are not my own’; in short, they feel remote controlled, a zombiefied self-model in which intentionality is diminished. Conversely, through this depersonalization they can also experience an inability to delimit the PSM from the world. They might to say, ‘I am the whole world’. Consequently, the schizophrenic subject might stand at the window all day, staring at the sun, controlling its movement with his/her mind. Or they might look down at the traffic in the street and control the movement of each tiny car; making the puppets walk; turning the traffic lights on and off. In such cases, the self-model expands to the boundaries and every miniscule change in the world is perceived to be self-caused. This is clearly where thought oversteps the threshold of what can be known, such as when the subject is in the thrall of sublime and inflates his/her visionary ideas to match its immensity. This is a mania, a pathology that Aguirre assumes when he declares that he is The Wrath of God, or much like Captain Ahab’s monomaniacal pursuit of the leviathan, whose monstrous corpus he manages to successfully integrate himself with; a successful binding of organism’s finite being with the infinitude of boundless ocean.

Then can we not say that idealism‘s totalizing thought-world bears a conspicuous similarity to this pathology? More acutely, the reality of the matter is far closer to that which Darwin intuits when he gazes upon the bucolic English countryside, which appears immutable and congenial, and whilst in appearance happy nature is representationally offered as an ordered harmony with man at its centre: ‘One may say there is force like a hundred thousand wedges trying [to] force every kind of adapted structure into the gaps in the economy of nature, or rather forming gaps by forcing out the weaker ones’ [OS, p, 67]. It is scientific objectivity that confirms this by providing a perspectival vantage point on the real –– a view from nowhere –– and on the contrary, it is mankind’s delusional self-hood that renders reality opaque by believing itself to be naturalized. This presumption of naturalized consciousness is grounded by evolution in our biomorphic architecture and grants us agency within our own milieu:

Human beings may –– and do –– differ in what they can imagine, in what classes of worlds they can consciously simulate, and in what they find intuitively plausible. We cannot imagine a thirteenth-dimensional shadow of a fourteen dimensional cube or the continuum of space-time, because the visual cortex of our ancestors was never confronted with this type of object and because the brain’s global model of reality is based on three spatial dimensions and one distinct, unidirectional temporal dimension sufficed for surviving in what was our biological environment. [BNO, p.595]

In Metzinger’s view we resemble Plato’s neurophenomenogical caveman; the neural cave being determined by our internal central nervous system. The shadows on the wall are as close as we get to access reality from our subterranean location, the shadows being a ‘low-dimensional projection of a higher-dimensional object’ [BNO, p. 548]. Yet whereas Plato claimed that all we could know was ourselves in the cave, Metzinger departs from the metaphor here to state that there is not even anyone in the cave at all. [5] Or rather, the interior surface of the cave is the ‘physical organism as a whole, including all of its brain, its cognitive activity, and its social relationships, that is projecting inward, from all directions at the same time’ [BNO, p. 550]. There is no homonuculus situated in the neural cave, just a shadow cast from the fire and projected onto the wall. A shadow we identify as us, yet the cave is empty. This excessively selective projection is defined by the contingencies of biological evolution. As such, neuroscience provides an injunction to abandon outmoded conceptions of our access to reality and highlights the timeliness of a metaphysics that seeks to continue to disenchant the world and allow us to think the ‘great-outdoors’. As we witness in Encounters at the End of the World, even the most objective and rational are prone to the mistaking to the flickering of the shadows on the wall of the cave as being meaningful. The decentering of the manifest image has presently become an important task, since it this very egocentric self-delusion that is endangering the future of mankind’s biological environment at a rate faster than we can evolve.

Footnotes:

[1] Herzog enhances the tension of sublimity in Encounters at the End of the World with the use of Russian Orthodox music composed for the lowest humanly possible vocal range, the Basso Profundo or ‘Voice of God’.

[2] Kant uses an example from the Bremen Magazine, Vol. IV entitled ‘Carazan’s Dream’ to express the horror of the sublime, in which the author relates a mind-state in which he encounters the Angel of Death who transports him to the outer limits of the cosmos: ‘I soon left countless worlds behind me. As I neared the outermost end of nature I saw the shadows of the boundless void sink down into the abyss before me. A fearful kingdom of silence, loneliness and darkness! Unutterable horror overtook me at this sight. I gradually lost sight of the last star, and finally the last glimmering ray of hope was extinguished in the outer darkness! Mortal terrors of despair increased with every moment, just as every moment I increased my distance from the last inhabited world. I reflected with unbearable anguish that if ten thousand times a thousand years more should have carried me along beyond the bounds of all the universe I would still be looking ahead into the infinite abyss of darkness, without help or any hope of return…’ [OFBS, p. 49]

[3] In Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime Lyotard conceives of the sublime as just such a crisis between reason and imagination, the differend of conflictual anxiety and pleasure, caused by the mind straining at the edges of itself and conceptuality: ‘The admixture of fear and exaltation that constitutes sublime feeling is insoluble, irreducible to moral feeling’ [LAS, p131]

[4] There is a moment in Aguirre when the remaining conquistadores on the raft see a ship in a tree, but are completely uncertain whether it is real or hallucinated and have no way of validating the experience by means of sense-data alone.

[5] Metzinger goes on to replace the limited metaphor of the cave with a further model, the technological metaphor of a total flight simulator, or vehicle consciousness, in which external reality is modelled internally in high-resolution in real-time, yet this phenomenal apparatus us invisible to us [BNO, p. 555].

Where to begin? The ethical and political questions before us are so urgent, so pressing, so difficult. Over the past year, a message of hope has been echoing through our streets. But the sound of hope is now fading fast. Many of us are reaching that excruciating point of struggle which alone keeps us from despair. A few seem to be crossing the threshold into the abyss.

Our current ethical and political dilemmas appear to surpass our ability even to articulate them precisely and properly. My choice of a beginning in this blog, if it is to be a truthful and responsible choice, will have to reveal something of the nature of the impasses that block our path forward. We need clarity about, and an ordered understanding of, the most important questions of our time. Why does justice always seem to elude our grasp? What is it about our legal. moral, and political institutions that makes them so vulnerable to the abuses of the market and the ruses of capital? Can we hope for a way out of our current impasses? Or are we condemned to a continuing cycle of booms and busts, repeated abuses of wealth and power, and relentless pounding of injustices and inequities?

My aim in this blog is to ask questions and to state truthfully my perplexity in these dark times. Perhaps my readers will be able to move us in the direction of “answers.” For my part, I will consider it a triumph to be able to put into words my disorientation.

So let us begin with the differend.

Differend is a technical term from the realm of the law that was taken up and made famous by Jean-François Lyotard (1924-1998) in the late eighties. His greatest work of philosophy is entitled The Differend: Phrases in Dispute (1988). It is a difficult book, but well worth the read. In my opening sequence of posts, I shall attempt to unpack the term “differend” in a first move toward the articulation of our ethical and political impasses. But first let me say a biographical word about Lyotard.

Lyotard was eight years old when Hitler came to power as chancellor of the Third Reich in Berlin; twelve when the National Socialist regime violated the treaty of Versailles by establishing troops in the disputed territory of the Rhineland; sixteen when German military forces invaded and occupied his home city of Paris; twenty-one when Paris was liberated by members of the French resistance; and twenty-three when he published his first book review in L’Age nouveau. The review was entitled “La Culpabilité Allemande” and gave a critical account of Karl Jaspers’ Die Schuldfrage: Ein Beitrag zur deutschen Frage. The expression zur deutschen Frage in Jasper’s subtitle echoes the most infamous wartime phrase of Nazi ideology, die Endlösung der judischen Frage, which appears to have been coined at the Wannesee Conference in January of 1942. As a young intellectual, Lyotard sensed the urgency of the question: how did it happen that genocide against European Jewry was executed by a traditionally Christian people? In the 1980s and into the 1990s, Lyotard continued to write texts in response to the challenge to think the Shoah: “Discussions, ou: Phraser après Auschwitz” (1981); Le Différend (1983); “Le Survivant” (1988), in honor of Hannah Arendt; Heidegger et ‘les juifs’ (1988); “Apropos de Heidegger et ‘les juifs’ ” (1988), a lecture delivered at conferences in Vienna and Freiburg; and “L’Europe, les juifs et le livre” (1990). A later volume, D’un trait d’union, suivi de Un trait, ce n’est pas tout par Eberhard Gruber et Lettre de Jean-François Lyotard (1994), is related to these earlier texts but directly addresses the disaster of the genocide only in passing.

In 1995, Lyotard and Gruber gave an interview, “Responding Questions,” which was subsequently bound together with Lyotard’s essay “Mainmise” (1990) and the contents of D’un trait d’union to form the posthumous English edition of The Hyphen: Between Judaism and Christianity (1999). In “Mainmise,” Lyotard quotes from Paul’s letters to draw our attention not only to an agreement between Jews and Christians “concerning the impossibility, meaninglessness, and abjection of an emancipation without manceps, without voice” (H, 9), but also to “a deep disagreement between them” that “stems … from the value that each accords to sacrifice” (9). The discussion of a state of being at once in agreement and disagreement, united and at odds, justifies the placement of “Mainmise” at the opening of The Hyphen. In the closing paragraph of the essay, Lyotard introduces additional marks of disjunction between Jews and Christian that have to do with questions of forgiveness, temporality, affect, and infancy. It appears that there is a past of childhood that cannot be known, or remembered, or even forgotten, never mind fulfilled. A past that was never present. How, then, can it be forgiven?

“We could explore much further the differend between the Torah and the Christian Testament by means of the question of forgiveness [pardon]. This question has a direct bearing on the problems of emancipation. It also plays a decisive role in the relationship to time, and, first of all, to the past. Hannah Arendt wrote in The Human Condition that forgiveness is the remission for what has been done. Not a forgetting but a new giving out, the dealing of a new hand. One would have to examine the relationship between this and emancipation. To ask who has such authority over the res gestas, over what has already been accomplished or fulfilled. But what about the past that has not been fulifilled, the past of a childhood [enfance] that will have been affected without knowing it? Can there be any remission or pardon for it?” (The Hyphen, 12)

Sad to say, Lyotard never found the opportunity to elaborate on the question of forgiveness. The Hyphen is one of Lyotard’s late writings, and besides, the interrogative finale of “Mainmise” was not asked with the hope of finding a simple “yes” or “no” answer. Lyotard’s crucial shift in vocabulary at the end of “Mainmise” –– from “the deep disagreement between [Jews and Christians]” to “the differend between the Torah and the Christian Testament” –– suggests instead that there is a conflict here that cannot be reconciled. Lyotard’s differend marks the deepening to the point of no return of an already deep disagreement. It has to do not just with religions or peoples as such, “Jews and Christians,” but more directly with their sacred books, “the Torah and the Christian Testament.” On the one hand, the words of the Torah cannot be enclosed and grasped in a pure present; they take hold of us in their incomprehensible grip and therefore take forever to read. On the other hand, the logos and justice of the Christian Testament is, or at least claims to be, knowable and assimilable now –– without delay. “Time has reached its plenitude” (peplérôtai ho kairós), announces the Christian Testament, “God’s kingly rule is at hand” (éngiken he basiléia tou theoú, Mk 1.15). The closing remarks of “Mainmise” suggest that Paul is implicated in the differend between the interminable Jewish reading of the Torah and the Christian claim to messianic knowledge and justice now. The apostle’s letters constitute a large portion of the Christian Testament and his writings on God’s justice, the messiah, temporality and “the Jewish question,” particularly in Romans 9-11, were taken up and repeatedly rewritten in the history of theology to legitimate and promote Christian polemics against the Jews.

My itinerary in the next posts will follow two paths. First, I want to bring into focus, through Lyotard’s political loyalties and intellectual commitments, his thinking on “the jews”. Second, I hope to present his concept of the differend and the paradoxical mode of temporality that is associated with it. Having traversed these two paths, I hope to be in a position to say something about the best we can hope for, in Lyotard’s judgment, concerning relations between Christian and Jews. A religious case study of the differend strikes me as a good place to start.