Lyotard and the Postmodern Condition

First Thought:

Lyotard's initial formulation of post-modernity, admitted by him as grossly simplified, is an incredulity toward meta-narratives. It is an attempt to understand the narratives of knowledge in their conception and application. Written for a time in which mass-communication, cybernetics and information processing technologies are changing the modes and forms of knowledge, he questions the process of knowledge (learning) and praxis (via legislation), but also and most importantly, of legitimation itself. The grand meta-narratives of the past were "dialectical", synthesizing whilst remaining unitary and linear. Teleological narratives were all-encompassing and all-pervasive, concealing or demoting all other forms of knowledge. The scientific meta-narrative acts as a universaliser, a cumulative progression of knowledge toward some ultimate truth, therefore is essentially totalitarian or terrorizing. The sociopolitical functions in the same way; "the name of the hero is the people, the sign of legitimacy is the people's consensus, and their mode of creating norms is deliberation. The notion of progress is a necessary outgrowth of this [CR 149]". It differs from traditional narrative knowledge, in Lyotard's view, in that its scientific pretensions assume an accumulation of knowledge and a progress of mankind. It supplants old teleology with linear progress. In doing so, power is justified and the retaliation against old/outmoded teleology does violence to individual thought, and any criticism of, or divergence from, the meta-goal. The need for consensus, for universality, suppresses and oppresses, as Stalinist Russia exemplifies.

Exactly.

The scientific narrative de-legitimated itself by demanding legitimation, in the sense that, its subscription to an assumed theory of "right" (a priori truths waiting to be discovered by the rational mind of man), its operation under premises and foundations that go unquestioned, requires the same kind of meta-narrative it hopes to authenticate. It, as legitimator, rests on unfounded pre-legitimations and is thus incapable of legitimating itself.

Lyotard favours "a multiplicity of finite meta-arguments, [meaning] argumentation that concerns meta-prescriptives and is limited in space and time." [CR 153]. The games, their rules, consensus and players must be heteromorphic (I would use polymorphic) and local. Paralogy is innovation within diversity, a productive resistance to meta-narratives. "No "pure" alternative to the system" [CR 153] will be stated, because none will work.

Another thought:

Now. There are some problems, I think, with Lyotard's text. "Consensus has become an outmoded and suspect value. But justice as a value is neither outmoded nor suspect. We must thus arrive at an idea and practice of justice that is not linked with that of consensus." [CR 153]
I think he means this in the same way he said that losing the nostalgia for the meta-narrative does not mean we are reduced to barbarity [CR 152], but doesn't this dissolve into relativism and can relativism work? Also, regardless of post-modern self-consciousness, don't most people rely on some meta-narrative to legitimate their existence? Whether they support multiplicity and plurality, don't most people still believe that there are some common fundamental principles?
I feel that in practice, it is hardest to understand how Lyotard's paralogy would work, without power groups using the lack of meta-narratives to omit their bottom line (profit/power) at the expense of human rights. Or to appeal to certain beliefs (especially fears or hopes) without concern for them at all, simply because they are effective.

Harry Frankfurt, Princeton dude, explores bullshit. Here is a rundown from the Princeton site (link here):

"He argues that bullshitters misrepresent themselves to their audience not as liars do, that is, by deliberately making false claims about what is true. In fact, bullshit need not be untrue at all. Rather, bullshitters seek to convey a certain impression of themselves without being concerned about whether anything at all is true. They quietly change the rules governing their end of the conversation so that claims about truth and falsity are irrelevant. Frankfurt concludes that although bullshit can take many innocent forms, excessive indulgence in it can eventually undermine the practitioner's capacity to tell the truth in a way that lying does not. Liars at least acknowledge that it matters what is true. By virtue of this, Frankfurt writes, bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are."

I am actually not sure what I think of Lyotard's theory. I understand it in principle and I can see similarities with Arendt's local polis-style logos (speech-action), but I wonder whether this only works on a local scale. Also, what of his opening of data banks? It seems as though he is an (admittedly pre-) internet utopian. As though freedom of information would lead to better decisions, or that it would solve the supposed problems that lack of information encompasses. What are those problems? Lack of power? "It could also aid groups discussing metaprescriptives by supplying them with the information they usually lack for making knowledgeable decisions... Language games would then be games of perfect information at any given moment." [CR 154) Hmm, sounds iffy.

The same thing goes for post-modernism in general; I kept thinking back to Lukác's fragmentation and reification; the continual splitting of the world (man, time, labour and so on) into easily contained and calculable segments. It seems as though this was justified by a grand narrative, progress, and now it is the grand narrative: multiplicity, diversity, individuality. Frederic Jameson accuses postmodernism as being the logic of late capitalism and I kind of agree with that. There is also a sense in which, unless (and often even if) you are continuously learning, critiquing, creating, playing and innovating, you will be under the umbrella of other controls (the State, ideologies, stereotypes etc), and this is not how most people live their lives. That is not a statement of supposed-self-superiority, more an acknowledgement that it is difficult to live this model and can be conducive to convenient generalisations, apathetic relativism, and fragmented personal narratives that allow both your capitalist urges and your dedication to the green movement, your subscription to freedom-based aphorisms, "fair go", "tolerance", "equality" and your patriotic approval of closed borders and secret fear of boat people.
Post-modern thinking seems just as easily abused as other meta-narratives, but perhaps more prone to bullshit.


Another Thought:

Re: Falling Water - I think that Frank Loyd Wright's house is alright as an example, certainly conceptually, but perhaps more pertinent examples would be Le Corbusier's Paris Plan, the Crystal Palace in London, Tatlin's tower, the Bauhaus building in Weimar (plus other Bauhaus architecture) and especially Brasilia. The obsession with glass was ideological; they were the attempted expressions of a utopian vision of truth and transparency. They were physical manifestations of ideas of a better world; in the same way that Kant believed we could, by seeing our progress in history, further it along its path, modernist architecture attempted to change the way that we existed in buildings, to change the world for the better. They were building a self-determined "new society", attempting to change ideas of beauty to encompass rationality, exemplified in the Bauhaus slogan "form follows function".
Of course, the thing is that the Bauhaus architecture, especially coordinated by Hannes Meyer, was attempting to work with both psychological, social and environmental factors, but it did have a social vision through so-called "biological architecture". Such ideas are usually corrupted and in hindsight we call them naive, but a skeptical view does not make their intent any less earnest or admirable. There were many modernist ideas of social architecture that believed the right type of architecture could diminish violence, could make men (always) rational, could shape a better humanity. There were "master" elements in architects, especially Le Corbusier, Wright etc, intellectual and theoretical elitism, which I think is often part of the meta-narratives of the absolute.
Brasilia is my favourite failed modernist project and one of the only completed full examples of the modernist vision. Its sociological intent was to create a classless society etc etc. Needless to day (not just because I have already mentioned it) it failed.

Le Corbusier's Paris Plan. Boo.

Le Corbusier's Unité d'Habitation, Marseille (kindergarten on roof)

The wondrous, scary Brasilia

Falling Water, Frank Loyd Wright

Plan for the Barbican Centre, London

Arednt on the Human Condition

Amy Sillman. Great Job.

First Thought:

Arendt is concerned with what she believes to be the rise of the social; the relegation of previously public affairs to the private realm and household matters to the public. She goes back to the Greek polis, a space where she felt real freedom could exist in action and speech.

'Action' in this sense is more than any single outcome or result. It is a space of coming together, an enlarged sphere of community where individuals can relate to each other and interact. Action leads to unpredictability and thus diverges from what Arendt sees as 'behavior', which as part of the rule by no-man, or modern bureaucracy, orders and conforms. Although standards for behavior constantly change, along with it laws, beliefs etc, the structure of modern society incorporates and enforces behavior. We create, but the products of our theories and technology also shape us. Freedom, plurality and solidarity are sacrificed to life necessities, comfort, abundance, control, production, behavior; this is the rise of the social. Action, so seen, is the freeing of human activity, where thinking and speech are tied to experience, community, spontaneity and unpredictability. Re-connecting thought-speech-action is Arendt's return to logos. It is not limited to a space or time, but is ephemeral, temporally and spatially existent only in the coming together of people in freedom; “Wherever you go, you will be a polis”. It allows greatness to come forth, for people to exceed themselves, to express themselves with courage and integrity, and to put themselves forward to be judged by others, though this must not be mistaken with modern notions of success, through wealth and power. Rather, it goes against material and calculable notions, arising “only where word and deed have not parted company, where words are not empty and deeds not brutal, where words are not used to veil intentions but to disclose realities, and deeds are not used to violate and destroy but to establish relations and create new realities ”. The polis can be taken as the space of appearance, “where I appear to others as others appear to me, where men exist not merely like other living or inanimate things, but to make their appearance explicitly.”

Another Thought:

The rise of the social seems overly restricted in its being the necessities of life. I still don't understand why she used this analogy; the great moral problems of our age are also encompassed in this sphere; power relations, subjugation, equal rights. The idea that the necessities of the private sphere have dominated politics is perhaps more about our becoming producers (not work, but labour) and consumers, holding jobs simply to get by or to fund our lifestyles. I think that her space of appearance is incredibly important and pertinent, as are her distinctions between labour and work, public and private (in the sense of freedom being seen as an inner domain, individuated and isolated, rather than a part of the public sphere). Perhaps I misunderstood her conception of the rise of the social, but it seemed that its separation from the political could only occur when there was a space of equality in which we could be free to act and speak. Since these social issues are political issues and we have not found a way to appear to each other as equals, this separation seems premature and limiting. The fundamental problem that she raises is that our society is one of consumers and producers, but not makers or actors. The rule of sanitized bureaucracy, the conformism and the schism in action and thought are problems of the rule of knowledge over learning and calculable success over ephemeral excellence.

Well, I was thinking of an analogy and I now think I understand what Arendt is talking about with the rise of the social. I was thinking of the ancient gardener and his tending to his plants, who respects the seed and nurtures it into its natural end (Heideggarian, of course). Then I thought about the removal of the foodspace from our lives, whereby mostly people do not live near the site of food production, it is no longer near to them. Food, sustenance, become necessities that must be organised, arranged, transported, bought. They become part of the city's responsibility to its citizens, securing their well-being. The care of the basic necessities, food and shelter, in bigger societies, falls to the State and later, corporations, to bureaucracy, to no-man. The concerns of the bureaucracy in a modern technological society are to provide this care in an efficient and cost-effective way, with the least imposition on monetary resources. This then becomes the political agenda, it becomes the function of the bureaucracy and the politicians, thereby dominating public life. We are shaped by society as much as we shape it. We fall into line with regards to our priorities, they become the same as the State's. With enough time passed, we no longer equate our ideas of humanity, of what it is to be human, with the public sphere. Rather, the public sphere is of practicality and how it is to be human; we become our own means and there are no views toward ends, in the sense of the fundamental questions toward the meaning of life. When we are so thoroughly obscured, we can start to see humans as impositions on our means; immigrants pose threats to jobs and so we see them as "illegal aliens" as if they were an illicit species, rather than our own kind. And yet, we still manage to enjoy cheaply made goods from third-world countries, where we are aware that no job security or fair wage policies exist. We are stuck in a selfish paradox, whereby we look only to our basic needs rather than asking bigger questions, polis-type questions, of what it means to be human, of what matters most, of whether a life of consumption is worth someone else's life of near-slavery.

Arendt Another Another Thought

Excerpt from

Wolf and Vampire: the Border between Culture and Technology

Mona Mahall and Asli Serbest

"Today, common sense tells us that the border between technology (formerly known as nature) and culture is a fluid one. It is common to describe technology as a cultural practice, or culture as a fabric of interwoven material, intellectual, and social techniques. Of course, there is an obvious interrelation between culture and technology in terms of method, media, and material, and it is not difficult to identify the technical aspects of texts, or the cultural implications of communication technologies, and so forth. This interrelation of culture and technology, however, is actually based on their separation, a border that is—insofar as we can perceive it—fundamental to modernity. The separation has nothing to do with objects or disciplines, with established criteria or genera, with groups or institutions. Rather, it is sharp but unstable—it is mobile, flashing here and there between form and function, between architecture and building.

The latest attempts to reconcile culture and technology had been preceded—over the last 250 years—by antagonist attempts at playing them off: on the one hand, there was the pessimistic tragedy of culture in a technical world, and, on the other, the optimism of continuous scientific and technological progress. For some, this meant the antagonism of German culture and French civilization. Or, as the Swiss historian Siegfried Giedion put it, the split between feeling and thinking in modernity

For Giedion, the divorce of thinking and feeling is rooted in the unevenness of scientific and artistic progress in the early nineteenth century, when feeling could not compete with the pace of thinking, which was advancing rapidly, and scientific achievements were regarded as neutral in terms of their emotional meaning. Important achievements had no bearing on inner life, and mechanization took command.⁴ The result of these developments is the “split personality” of the modern mind, which separates thinking and feeling. Even more scandalous than the divorce of culture and technology in the nineteenth century was a repression of artistic imagination, in which art assumed the form of eclecticism—separated from the creative power of the epoch and maneuvered into the grotesque “reign of the upholsterer.” "

Arendt on Tradition and the Modern Age

Another Thought:

What I wonder about Arendt is where her conception of logos (encompassing speech and reason) sits within a framework (or whether it does at all). Is logos given equal weight in and outside the mind, as in, must it be paired with action to constitute her equal relations? Or is it more a way of being in the world, where the thinking about thinking is encompassed in a bigger idea of us thinking in the world just as we conceive of doing in the world; as in, giving them the same necessity. In order to dissolve the duality, we must redirect thinking toward Plato's cave, back to the real world. If this is the case, I actually think this has a lot in common with Heidegger's reformulation of Being, as the way we are in the world, insofar as he advocates a more holistic way of understanding being that is not just correct, but true (to use his words). That in the general understanding of these concepts, they are only available as dualities, which is why Arendt references Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and Marx as not breaking with the philosophical tradition but simply distorting or inverting it. A new (and perhaps Heidegger would have found an Old High German word or re-imagined a lost ancient greek one) understanding needs to be not just thought, not just ushered in to the annals of philosophical tradition, but enacted, lived. Could a dissolution of the duality see a change in the way that we exist, both alone (with ourselves) and together?

Ok, so I don't know enough about this and I did look it up on Wikipedia, but the stoics did seem to have a rather active conception of Logos, where reason is also identified with animation and generation in the world. "The stoics took all activity to imply a Logos, or spiritual principle." It was the active reason pervading the universe and animating it... it was conceived as material i.e. in this world. The law of generation was logos spermatikos or seminal logos, the "principle of the active reason working in inanimate matter." Humans possess a portion of divine logos.

So perhaps I am taking Arendt into a Heideggerian-type reformulation of language, but I find this to be crucial in a reformulation of thinking, i.e. the way that we think about ourselves, the way that we think about thinking, the way that we think about action. I think that for all the criticism of Heidegger's flowery language and poésis, it is genuinely necessary to get out of a language system that has become so restricted in its potential for meaning, i.e. to give importance to the exactness of language, rather than allowing play, multiplicity or poetry, feeds into a kind of science of ordering and fixing. Limited meaning also limits the ways of seeing and understanding. Not, of course, that reformulating would mean taking the opposite of exactness and doing away with meaning altogether or some sort of radical Dada cutting words from dictionaries, letting them fall on the floor, picking them up and as they come, assembling them into a nonsense poem. Rather, thinking in terms of the correct but not true. A more holistic view, that (an this is what I think Arendt is getting at) does not presume to know or formulate the "true" but rather acknowledges that proclaiming as "truth" is the problem. Our understanding of the separated worlds of contemplation and action can be seen in a different way, not as separate at all, but as a logos, thinking that animates, a constant relationship between us and the world that exists in no prescribed generalisation. A problem, as I see it, is that certain technologies expand this gap (thought/action) by placing action in a non-space - i.e. the Internet, of which I am a part, insofar as, if space is where we must exist, where we must be in the world, think in the world, act in the world, the placement in this non-space of the products of logos (thought/action), not only inhibits "real-world" action but diminishes something of the active thought as well. Back to the example; whilst our relation to thought and thinking on the Internet may be seen as liberating in some regards (connection to wider audiences, communities, informations etc), it necessarily exists in a different "space" to our human relationships. Not different as in opposite, just not the same. It precludes certain aspects of our physicality that cannot be denied as we engage full-bodied with the world. One interesting thing I have read about in the realms of neuroscience is our misconception of things like emotions, where we often think of them as intangible or as "mental events", but how inextricably they are connected and reliant upon bodily functions. Anger, for example, is almost inconceivable without the constriction of blood vessels, tensing of muscles, shaking and other symptoms that are part of it. These are bodily, and as such, bound in space. What happens when this physicality is somewhat diminished (as I believe it is on the Internet)? Is our engagement also limited? And if we are trying to imagine a fluid, holistic encompassing of thought and action, is not thought also diminished, being estranged from action. Again, not that I am a Luddite, nor do I believe that Heidegger was one, but I do think that each "way of..." limits another. The way of being on the Internet limit others. It is not that prescribing a ratio of these "ways of..." will fix or improve anything, or that there is or must be a "way of" understanding "ways of..", rather, simply understanding that there are ways of being and that these often privilege or limit other aspects of being, could allow the kind of ongoing, real-time relationship with thinking and action, whereby living itself is constituted as the relationship between oneself and ways of being.

I was going to end with something I like that this dude, Shiv Visvanathan, wrote before the turn of the millennium in A Letter to the 21st Century; "The magical must liberate reason from its anxieties of universalism; the part can only be the whole, if the whole is mysterious."

But instead I shall leave you with Goethe:

All theory, dear friend, is grey, but the golden tree of life springs evergreen.

Building, Dwelling, Thinking

Heidegger is asking the question of how we exist within the world. We, as man, dwell. He refers back to the old German word Buan to encompass the dwelling that is now hidden by our ideas of building. This old word contains building both as cultivating and protecting and as erecting edifices. It is important to see our relationship to the world in a new way. Heidegger's idea of the fourfold allows this; earth, sky, mortals, divinities. They must all co-exist as the original oneness. Humans must neither master the Earth, nor passively stand in wait. They save, care and nurture; they gather. "But if dwelling preserves the fourfold, where does it keep the fourfold's essence?... Dwelling, as preserving, keeps the fourfold in that with which mortals stay: in things." Things create space, allow locales, in their gathering of the fourfold. The boundary does not limit or stop, but allows a thing's unfolding. We exist in space, we dwell, we stay within the fourfold. Heidegger traces nachbar, neighbour, back to the old German word Nachgebauer, the near-dweller. It points to being on the earth and being mortal, but also has connotations of caring, nurturing, protecting, cherishing, saving. He relates the words peace, Friede, the free, preserved from harm and danger, safeguarded and takes the real meaning of freedom to be a sparing, a positive notion of allowing something to develop in its own essence, to allow things peace and to be free in the fourfold. Building, so considered (in the original sense), is admitting and installing the fourfold, allowing a space, a locale, to house our human lives. But this notion is corrupted when, instead of attending to the fourfold and our place within it, we construct without respecting the meaning of human dwelling and its inescapable relation to thinking and building. The modern world imposes constructed edifices on the landscape, rather than encompassing them in a respectful relationship.

Another Thought:

We were talking about types of houses, from the Black Forest farmhouse, which harbours the family from birth to death, respects both mortality and divinity, and both the Earth and sky. This is contrasted with pre-fab houses, built for no-one in particular, set upon the ground at no particular location, that need not heed the sky if it can pump water from elsewhere, that need not heed the Earth, for it is no longer the supplier of sustenance or nutrients, which come now from supermarkets and chemists. This kind of construction, social and physical, does not care for mortality, which it avoids, nor divinity, in which it does not believe. We no longer dwell, as a sparing, rather we abuse those which cannot protect themselves, both the Earth and ourselves. In this strange non-relationship, we have lost sight of ourselves as co-existent, with others, with the earth, sky and divinities. The divinities can be associated with Being, Dasein, and wonder, rather than meaning transcendent Gods. We need simply to renew our understanding of what it means to exist, to dwell, to be and we will find our place as nurturers once again. I think this means that we must live in a "constant relationship" - by this I mean, live with integrity, fully, continuously and conscientiously. There is a schism, it seems, between our ideals and our reality and it seems a constant refrain that, one would like to live better, it is just too expensive, inconvenient, time-consuming etc. We must reconsider what it is that makes us human; whether it is more akin to consumption or nurturing. It is relatively pointless to have lofty ideals and better goals (which is why the Green/eco movement is allowing us to continue guilt-free consumption) without an integrity in action.

Heidegger and the Question Concerning Technology

First Thought:

Heidegger starts by leading us into the type of questioning that he thinks has been neglected, in this case, the questioning of the essence of technology. He points out that it is nothing technological in the sense that it is not machinery or tools, rather it can be seen as a way of revealing. The ancient Greek word for revealing in Heidegger's sense is aletheia. From this point we have two possibilities for unconcealment, of revealing; the first is poiesis, the bringing-forth and the second is enframing, Gestell, a type of revealing that can be seen more as a challenging of the world, by man's domination as subject, who conceives of the world through science, over object. Revealing can be seen as how things come into being; either on their own (en heautoi) or by another (en alloi). The tree, for example, comes into being out of itself. We humans may be the caretakers, gardeners, nurturers and may set the tree up straight and help it along its way, but we are not the makers of the tree. This is simple enough for us to understand. But what of a table? We are given four causes - materialis (matter/material) - in this case the wood from a certain type of tree, formalis (shape) - a family dining table, finalis (the end that determines the previous two) - the family meal, the gathering of the family around a table - this determines where the family is and thus the available wood, how big the family is, the size, the shape etc, and the causa efficiens - the bringing about of the table, informed by the other 3, and en alloi (by another) in this case. When these four causes are all co-responsible and co-existent, we may have the original root of technology, techne, the arts and activities of the craftsman, the arts of the mind and the fine arts. Techne is a bringing-forth, a poiesis, that allows the material and the craftsman integrity. The opposite would be a modern day, mass-produced table, whose causes are never co-responsible; rather than a specific end in mind, there is a general telos - anyone willing to pay for the table is the desired end, the material must be easy to mass-produce and is often inorganic, the shape must be exactly reproducible every time, and the maker is often a machine, with no knowledge of the end or means (itself). How did we get to this stage? What broke up the four causes? Heidegger points to enframing and man as being challenged forth to conceive of the world as standing-reserve. This means that nature is seen in its predetermined potentiality - solely as potential for man's endeavours, whose potential is predetermined in a scientific, orderable and calculable way. The standing-reserve is the world as regulated, secured resource at the ready for man's and science's further ordering. Man is not solely responsible for this; he is not to blame. Neither is Heidegger asking us to ignore or reject technology. Man must be brought back into his essence, his role in the four causes. Enframing covers other ways of revealing (namely poiesis) and the danger lies in our not being able to conceive of the world differently. Man is Dasein, the beings able to comprehend the idea of being, thus caretakers, nurturers. We must come back into a relationship with the world that is respectful. When man is "meditating, striving, shaping and working, entreating and thinking, he finds himself everywhere brought into the unconcealed." To have a continued and diligent relationship to the world, to respect the four causes as co-responsible, thus to respect the material, shape, end and oneself as co-creator, is to no longer see the world as simply standing by waiting for man to do something with it. This attitude applies not just to energy resources, or made things, but to everything, to the world and to humans. One of the dangers is seeing ourselves as standing-reserve, and we need only think of the holocaust, the gulag, and in a more ordinary context, the deskilled labourer who need not even know what is being created or who will one day use it, what materials are being used etc. As humans, we become part of the orderable, less creator or causa efficiens than manipulated manipulator, part of an increasingly complex and fragmented set of causes.

Adorno & Horkheimer on Myth Making

First thought:

In continuing from Lukács, Adorno and Horkheimer take on enlightenment as a power relationship that subdues nature through understanding and knowing. This is not a modern concept; it can be seen in its first instances in myth and language; in magic. But there are differences, as for Lukács, between premodern subject-object relations and their modern counterparts. Magic is an appeal to the mysterious, to the total; it is enacted in a relation of kinship, of expressing. Our new form of enlightenment, scientific rationalism as espoused by Bacon, dominates by disenchanting; power is increased in estrangement over that which it is exerted [VI] . Appearing in the first distinctions between subject and object, it ends with a single relationship between the subject who confers meaning and the meaningless object, between rational significance and its accidental bearer [VII]. In this singular relation, everything collapses away from the subject and into "the rest of the world", becoming meaningless and undifferentiated. Everything is relatable as science and structure; all myths and religions are comparable, equalised, neutered, forming the structure through which we "build" our world. Adorno and Horkheimer argue that the enlightenment, in attempting to disenchant the world, has formed its own techno-cratic enchantment, of debasing self-violation, where nothing human is trusted and concepts of truth and mind become superstitions. It has created societies where the individual is negated and mystery de-mystified through belittlement. The means has been the same means throughout time; the ordering of the universe that reaches back to original myth, is explanation prompted by fear. The fear is the experience of the whole in contrast with the singular; the principle of mana, the primal and unknown substance from which everything springs and holds. It fixes the transcendence of the unknown in relation to the known, permanently linking horror to holiness. Our reaction in explanation is the original ordering, the original control, the original domination. This division has lent itself forward in time to the perverse divisions of reason and non-reason, subject and world, truth and veil. Now we are beyond division into the realm of indivisibility, where everything beyond the realm of subject is interchangeable, everything is the same. Even the self has been stripped of all natural traces, no longer body, soul or ego, but a transcendental logical subject, the reference point of reason. Thus, we have too become interchangeable, we are mere heads to count, either working parts or errors to be corrected. It is reason we have deified at our own expense, reason whose place on the throne was to serve our betterment, fulfilment and happiness, but in its throning we became its kingly subjects and its scientific objects. It became mythic.

Another thought:

I was thinking about Adorno and Horkheimer's conception of language as evidencing the animate against the inanimate, becoming both itself and something else, identical and not identical. Through the deity speech is transformed from tautology into language [11]. More on this later. For now, Bacon cites printing, artillery and the compass having been arrived at more by chance than by systematic enquiry into nature; rather, all three (four if we break printing down into paper as well) were invented in China, and the methodical investigations were less happenstance than old Bacon imagines. Chinese paper gif; paper to pixels, no magic in that.

So, I got really into the Adorno/H concept of mana, which I found out is not a Greek principle at all (cleverly worded by Adorno), but is a Polynesian concept of the great supernatural power that is everything. I'm still not entirely sure how it fits together, because Marcel Mauss (who Adorno does footnote later in the Dialectic in relation to this principle) in his work on magic and the gift, talks of mana as something one possesses i.e. in the improper observation of gift exchange, one can lose one's mana and therefore prestige. I am not sure whether this is a Maussian view of mana, a manifold meaning, or some specific societal formulation of it. I just borrowed Mauss' general theory of magic from the library so hopefully I will be able to clarify soon. I like Adorno's description of mana as "not a spiritual as opposed to a material substance, but the intricacy of the Natural in contrast to the individual" or in another translation "not a spiritual substance in contradistinction to the material world but the complex concatenation of nature in contrast to its individual link." (I think this one is more poetic) and

"The gasp of surprise which accompanies the experience of the unusual becomes its name" or "The cry of terror called forth by the unfamiliar becomes its name". (This is the second translation and now I prefer the first, which I think places proper emphasis on the unknown and less on the cry of terror. I will definitely have to learn German so that I can better understand these authors I like so much)

A bit more: "mana, the moving spirit, is no projection, but the echo of the real supremacy of nature in the weak souls of primitive men" (here the second translation is quite similar). I think that what I like so much about this concept is the enchantment of nature, but not as "God" or knowable, comprehensible thing, but as the stuff the world, that is magic because it is unknowable and ungraspable rather than being ungraspable because it is magic. I think this is a really important distinction and perhaps the mistaken inversion is why we get stuck upon ideas of Gods etc. Can we find a way to incorporate these ideas of mana and acceptance of the unknown into our society, which must categorise and objectify everything? I am not sure, but I think it is not necessarily about believing in an ancient Polynesian principle, but about being more holistic in our understanding (also, I would like a better word than holistic, if you have one) of the world. It is not a dismissal of science to think of the world imbued with mana, for if we take mana to be the "complex concatenation of nature in contrast to its individual link", it is a way of seeing and understanding rather than a "thing" or a substance. It is an attitude that allows us to encompass more than just one view of the world, for when we privilege one way of seeing, we unavoidably diminish another. So imbuing the world with mana is not thingifying an entity named Mana, rather, it is an attitude of respect for the complexity of ideas, people, things and how they all fit together.

Lukács and Instrumentality

First thought:

Lukács, writing in 1923, attempts to understand the all-pervading commodity-structure and its effect on the objective evolution of society. It is the Marxist concept of reification that Lukács brings to the fore, attempting to examine the thing-ifying nature of capitalism without resorting to the very mode of analysis that he is trying to critique. It is important to understand that a quantitative approach would impose the commodity-structure on the abstract notions that we are trying to explore, namely the psyche and time. It must be looked at qualitatively, at the way that this mode changes our perception of ourselves, our relationship to our own psyches and to those of others.

In service of reason, humankind has praised systematisation and classification, and in this, has sought to predict and control. It becomes apparent that the scientific method becomes not only the means to gain knowledge, but increasingly becomes the only criteria for value. Mechanistic qualities become the norm and humanistic qualities become "mere sources of error" [CR, 89]. The mind, the seat of Reason, sets out to make the world calculable, repeatable, known. Labour becomes abstracted in the division and restriction of time; just as time is chained to an instrument, the clock, man is tied to his labour, the 'thing' he now owns. Thus, in the understanding of himself, man can separate and fragment, calculate and reason. He is no longer holistic, but atomised, a possessor of "things", a seller and buyer whose parts can come and go. As the system increasingly becomes machine-like, something that as individuals we are unable to do, man finds himself no longer the true possessor of himself, rather, he must fit into the already normalised system; as Lukács says, he becomes contemplative rather than active. Less and less is man able to see past the veil of reification to the true nature of things, and more and more does this veil come to cover the whole world, subjectively, in the sense that it becomes the only way in which we see ourselves and others, our personal, human relationships, and objectively, in that over time, this mode of existence becomes the very structure of the world, no longer veiling, but building. How are we to see past this when it becomes the framework of our existence? It seems that the first modes of critique, that of identifying and separating out a concept in order to analyse and understand it, serves only to mimic the commodity-structure, reifying the reification process. It is this that I find Lukács unable to confront or adequately deal with. It is not that the commodity relation must be understood in its entirety, for that is the wrong way of thinking about it. Nor is it to be dismissed and ignored. We must attempt to balance the qualitative and quantitative nature of existence without attempting to know it completely. It is mystery that we must admire; art, spontaneity, intuition, irrationality, subjective feeling, error, praxis, music, the tactile and the sensual.

Another thought:

I recently read an article on artnet about Dada. I had always thought of Dadaism as the wonderful Tzara and the Ball/Hemmings cabaret fanfare, an admirable moment in history, based on an unrepeatable, unsustainable philosophy, much like nihilism. Something that came into existence to challenge the whole, to simultaneously say no and yes to everything, to hover and rage, to be static and surging, to call on everything and call on nothing. Complete negation.

In Berlin I found a book by Francois Jullien, professor at Université Paris Diderot, on chinese philosophy, called In Praise of Blandness. It speaks of the difference between the Western and Eastern conception of the bland. In Chinese, surrounded by Daoist and Confucianist ideas, the "dan" is the infinite ability of all things, it is the centre, the undifferentiated. It is flavourless because it is infinite and unfixed; unable be characterised or systematised. We would perhaps classify this as "nothing" or complete negation, but the opposite is true; it is complete becoming.

I have realised that Dada was an instance of this; not nihilism but complete becoming. The idea of this little movement was to be suggestible to everything, to be completely spontaneous in the face of mechanisation, to not be "nothing", but to live in undifferentiated freedom to become. As a matter of point, Tzara said Dada was finished as soon as it "is", in the sense that once classified, once "known" and understood, the it no longer exists except as an historical fact.

But what of Arendt?

"Evil is never "radical",… it is only extreme, and… it possesses neither depth nor any demonic dimension… It is "thought-defying"… because thought tried to reach some depth, to go to the roots, and the moment it concerns itself with evil, it is frustrated because there is nothing. That is its "banality"." (1964)

Is the bland the same as the banal? Can these two ideas ever co-exist, or must they be relegated to differing modes of thought, one of "becoming" and the other of negation, the "without".

I have just, on the recommendation of a Nihon Otaku, started reading "Heidegger's Hidden Sources; East Asian Influences on his Work". It shows Heidegger's debt to Daoist and Zen Buddhist philosophies; especially in his conception of Nothing, which comes as radically different to the Western understandings before it. Being, nothing, emptiness. Oh the joy. Actually, I am only up to the first chapter, but I am convinced. I wonder if Jullien has read this?

I leave you with Dada:

I have given a pretty faithful version of progress, law, morality and all other fine qualities that various highly intelligent men have discussed in so manv books, only to conclude that after all everyone dances to his own personal boomboom, and that the writer is entitled to his boomboom: the satisfaction of pathological curiosity; a private bell for inexplicable needs; a bath; pecuniary difficulties; a stomach with repercussions in life; the authority of the mystic wand formulated as the bouquet of a phantom orchestra made up of silent fiddle bows greased with philtres made of chicken manure. With the blue eye-glasses of an angel they have excavated the inner life for a dime's worth of unanimous gratitude. If all of them are right and if all pills are Pink Pills, let us try for once not to be right. Some people think they can explain rationally, by thought, what they think. But that is extremely relative. Psychoanalysis is a dangerous disease, it puts to sleep the anti-objective impulses of men and systematizes the bourgeoisie. There is no ultimate Truth. The dialectic is an amusing mechanism which guides us / in a banal kind of way / to the opinions we had in the first place. Does anyone think that, by a minute refinement of logic, he has demonstrated the truth and established the correctness of these opinions? Logic imprisoned by the senses is an organic disease. To this element philosophers always like to add: the power of observation. But actually this magnificent quality of the mind is the proof of its impotence. We observe, we regard from one or more points of view, we choose them among the millions that exist. Experience is also a product of chance and individual faculties. Science disgusts me as soon as it becomes a speculative system, loses its character of utility-that is so useless but is at least individual. I detest greasy objectivity, and harmony, the science that finds everything in order. Carry on, my children, humanity . . . Science says we are the servants of nature: everything is in order, make love and bash your brains in. Carry on, my children, humanity, kind bourgeois and journalist virgins . . . I am against systems, the most acceptable system is on principle to have none. To complete oneself, to perfect oneself in one's own littleness, to fill the vessel with one's individuality, to have the courage to fight for and against thought, the mystery of bread, the sudden burst of an infernal propeller into economic lilies.... Every product of disgust capable of becoming a negation of the family is Dada; a protest with the fists of its whole being engaged in destructivc action: *Dada; knowledge of all the means rejected up until now by the shamefaced sex of comfortable compromise and good manners: Dada; abolition of logic, which is the dance of those impotent to create: Dada; of every social hierarchy and equation set up for the sake of values by our valets: Dada; every object, all objects, sentiments, obscurities, apparitions and the precise clash of parallel lines are weapons for the fight: Dada; abolition of memory: Dada; abolition of archaeology: Dada; abolition of prophets: Dada; abolition of the future: Dada; absolute and unquestionable faith in every god that is the immediate product of spontaneity:* Dada; elegant and unprejudiced leap from a harmony to the other sphere; trajectory of a word tossed like a screeching phonograph record; to respect all individuals in their folly of the moment: whether it be serious, fearful, timid, ardent, vigorous, determined, enthusiastic; to divest one's church of every useless cumbersome accessory; to spit out disagreeable or amorous ideas like a luminous waterfall, or coddle them -with the extreme satisfaction that it doesn't matter in the least-with the same intensity in the thicket of one's soul-pure of insects for blood well-born, and gilded with bodies of archangels. Freedom: Dada Dada Dada, a roaring of tense colors, and interlacing of opposites and of all contradictions, grotesques, inconsistencies: LIFE

Hegel on Philosophy and History

First thought:

In Hegel's account of reason, it is thinking that holds the power to explain the world. What we see in nature, in terms of singularities perceived by the senses, our thinking, or our Reason, turns into universals. Pure thinking is when thinking turns on itself, is at home with itself, when the thinker understands himself as a free-thinking thing. This we perceive as universal, Absolute, but we also retain ourselves in a position of free thinker, thinking the universal of which we are a part. This, for Hegel, is what we know as Geist, or Spirit (with no accurate translation, though it is also related to ideas of soul and ghost). This universal is self-determining, not determined.

For Hegel, this process began in Ancient Greece and in a movement of continual progress, the Geist has developed, deepened and grown. So the spirit conceives of itself as universal, of itself as thought by thinkers, and this is the foundation of political freedom. One perceives oneself and recognises one's subjective thinking-freedom as part of the universal, thus pulling apart from nature and becoming at home with itself instead. This is the birth of philosophy, for as thinking universalises particulars, philosophy is the thinking of thinking, it universalises the universaliser, whilst remaining on the level of the subjective. Meaning is bound up in human cognition; the world is understandable insofar as it is we who undertake an understanding of it.

Hegel is concerned here with philosophical history, in attempting to access the Geist, to understand the concepts that animate certain cultural periods. World History is a dialectic, insofar as it determines itself, successively overcoming and synthesising old determinations, gradually becoming richer and more concrete. (CR) Each step in this process has its own determinate principle, encompassing every aspect of a nation's consciousness. It is integral to the philosophical conception of World History to understand why certain principles became inadequate, why they failed and how the Geist transformed itself. Reason is critical and never satisfied; the intellectual sphere is self-transforming and in societies throughout World History, there inevitably comes a point where the objective sphere, within which that culture is based, is no longer adequate. It is then, at this crucial point, when the subjective, intellectual sphere will push to the point of destruction the society it has outgrown. The product is a synthesis, where the old resides within the new, the Geist ever deeper and concrete. Thus we progress.

It is modernity, Hegel believes, that encompasses a truly new relationship of the subjective world to the objective. Taking Kant's notion of rational critique out of its idealised sphere, where it remains unintegrated into the reality of everyday life, Hegel conceives of its synthesis within a society that whose spiritual Being is at home with the objective conditions within which it exists. Modernity has the capacity to create such a society, where culture, social and political institutions, law, governance, and religion are such that the rational being, freeing himself from dogmatism, questioning and criticising, will Be At Home (Beisichsein) within them; the capacity for self-transformation will be a property of the modern society as well as its individual subjects.

Another thought:

From what I have understood of Hegel, his praise of modernity is premature. Without even delving into the notion of a constitutional monarchy as the ideal form of government (perhaps only with an equally ideal Hegelian citizen would this actually seem feasible), I cannot grant him modernity's synthesis of subjective and objective spheres. Insofar as Ideas are most clearly understood right before their demise, in a kind of hubristic crystallisation, his conception of modernity is safe. A society whose Home has as its Geistian foundation the intellectual ideas of self-transformation, critique and progress, must inevitably cease to become a Home at all. Speed, the crucial quickening of The Industrialised (society, culture, mind, soul), will destroy the ability for the cultural to remain a home, and will in turn destroy the mind's conception of a such a philosophical, memory-based space. Home will disappear, and we will feel lost. I return once again to nostalgia, that abhorred word whose mention will produce knowing smirks and grimaces, the concept that we wrongly believe to refer only to a mawkish sentimentalising of the past, a feeling of the "golden ages". The word, from the Greek nostos - 'return home' algos - 'pain', means acute homesickness, and in it we will find (as we usually do with nostalgia) the past, but in this, a Hegelian past. The sea that we have crossed is Hegel's own; "when we think freely, voyaging on the open sea, with nothing under us and nothing over us, in solitude, alone by ourselves, then we are purely at home with ourselves". We have voyaged, we have felt free and new, and perhaps now we simply feel alone. When György Lukács, in his 1920 work 'Theory of the Novel', spoke of "transcendental homelessness", he was speaking directly to a Hegelian demise.

Lear too addresses this important ontological problem of cultural collapse - when an old way of life becomes impossible, when the guiding cultural principles are inadequate, how does one go on? Looking retroactively at the Crow culture, Lear recounts the way in which a culture, through collective anxiety, dream ritual and interpretation, attempts to form an active relationship with its future, to maintain some control. When, looking back, there is nothing one can do or think that makes sense anymore, how can one proceed. "The end of history" for the Crow may well hint at our own impending collapse. How will we create and maintain a relationship to the future that is imaginable to our present Geist? It seems clear that the modern way of life is rapidly becoming unsustainable, population increase untenable and socio-economic divisions ever widening.

The problem we face is made more serious by the fact that the means we have to make sense of the world is the rational system, the very problem we are looking to solve. We are unable criticise outside of the sphere that we inhabit, the critical method being its framework. We do not resort to dreams, save Freudian analysis (which itself has become an outmoded form of discovery), nor do we pay proper attention to the irrational; all things sense based, art, music, literature, nature, have become functional, they are means to an end rather than ends in themselves. Meditation is "used" by corporations as well as people, to improve functioning, to deal with stress, to be more efficient. We will discuss this kind of instrumentality with Lukács next week.

Kantian Cosmopolitan Ideal

It is, for Kant, reason that separates mankind from nature, and yet, it is in nature and in accordance with natural law that reason and free will are manifested as human action. Taking a long perspective of human history, one is able to discover patterns that would initially seem impossible to predict, contingent as they are upon decisions of individual free will. Though, far from chaotic and confused, this aggregate of human actions is shown to be the slow but steady progress of our species, the eventual goal of which is the complete fulfillment of its natural capacities. Kant, adhering to a teleological theory of nature, underlines man’s purpose of furthering to their end the near boundless capacities producible by the faculty of reason. In this, it is inevitable that man be in society, for his ability to reach beyond his natural instincts requires a dependence upon others that the self-sufficient savage has not. This reaching thus necessitates a desire to be in society, the only place this rational faculty can be fostered and his purpose fulfilled; it is the only place he can feel like a man. Simultaneously, his free will inclines him to direct what he can around him in accordance with his own principles, “to live as an individual” and rationally expect others to do the same. This tension, a continual resistance by one toward others and others toward one, is the antagonism of which Kant speaks. It is this, if we are to attain our proper goal set by nature, which must be preserved in a type of civil society that is both maximally free and properly limited insomuch as the same rights extend to all. It is the inevitable great federation (Fœdus Amphictyonum) toward which our history aims, the culmination of individual and large-scale antagonisms that serve as progress through trial, transformation and evolution. It is this form of tension, that having led man from barbarism to civilised society, will lead it to its future goal but all the while hinder its progress. Insofar as mankind is intended to produce everything out of itself, Kant suggests that it is also intended to self-accredit, and in this, possess rational self-esteem. To find oneself “worthy of life and well-being” is the coupling of vanity and reason, where success, amongst one’s peers and in one’s own eyes, is the driving force for rational progress through hardship. It is not the happiness of living peaceably and in comfort, but the pleasure derived from a competitive self-perfecting that develops mankind further along its path. Vanity prompts us to desire apartness from society insomuch as we wish our individual success, but to also require that society, for we have no such success or failure, no status, without the relative others. Without this desire for status, man’s innate capacities would lie dormant, and in Kant’s eyes, would barely render his existence valuable. Vanity comes into conflict with Kant’s teleological view of man’s purpose, in that as self-seeking, exempting himself from the law when he can, a just masterless master (or masters) is impossible; "nothing straight can be constructed from such warped wood.” He barely solves this problem, deeming the perfect solution impossible and settling for approximation. Eventually the vanity that fosters reason will produce late in its stages, the things necessary for the law governed social order; namely, the correct conception of the proper constitution, the right experience and the good will necessary to accept it. Thus, this unsociableness, like the social structures within which it is integrated, will reach equilibrium within the proper conditions, its various evils the necessary steps through which will be produced a purely productive antagonism within a perfectly just civil society. This seems contingent upon ideals that have a basis in Western tradition, which will inevitably come into conflict with other forms, especially those that do not place an emphasis on the individual, and may be challenged as tradition masked as reason.

Kant attributes intention to nature, though it is unclear as to what he means in this context; it encompasses, at the very least, both the world of phenomena and the laws that govern it. “Nature gave man reason and freedom of will based upon reason”. In this sense, nature must, if not reach into the noumenal realm, at least connect with it, in the sense of producing that, reason, which will act from it. He affords nature intent, and with intent, a goal. The system and principles of the natural world bespeak no superfluity; it is purposeful, and it would be unwise, in Kant’s mind, to suppose that man is the only exception. The teleological end is the full development of the germs implanted in a species, which subsist as innate capacities; just as the seed contains within it the grown oak, mankind contains within itself all of its fulfilled and unfulfilled potentials. Unlike an oak, mankind’s goal cannot be achieved in a single lifetime, but only succeeding many generations, each synthesizing and improving on the last. As it has reason as means and reason-products as ends, and reason requires both society and freedom, a just civil constitution must be established that balances the unsocial and social aspects of man, thereby maintaining the dynamism required for progress. The whole of history can be seen as the undertaking of this goal, with individual, social and state antagonisms serving as initial attempts, continually improved upon, toward a moral whole. War and revolution, horrible as they may be, are nature’s way of dissolving old structures and creating new ones, which too, “either in themselves or alongside one another, will … be unable to survive” until finally creating a system that, internally and externally, maintains itself automatically. In a sense, each structure up until the last contains within itself the seed of its own destruction. It is hard to accept that wars and inhumanity of all kinds could be nature’s way of bringing about our talents, and it could be argued whether the goal is worth the price, not to mention the obvious problem of attempts to fulfill that goal in engineering a “super race”. There comes a point when the furthering of our capacities means doing so to the detriment of others, where limited resources for a consumerist-technological society do not allow progress without intentional destruction, subjugation, and wealth or population control. There are further problems with perspectival progress within a teleological system, and though Kant dismisses the possibility that “nature is purposive in its parts but purposeless as a whole”, a teleonomic[11] theory is just as, if not more, likely[12]. Directive principles do not have to mean a Director and lack of superfluity in nature does not give credence to an intentioned system. This, though, would raise problems with our real world conception of purpose and how well we deal with ideas of war, human nature, rights, and morality. Kant is not unaware of this inherent contradiction. Not only does he suggest that we must assume a plan of nature to give us hope, but postulates a wise creator; appeals made more to faith than reason. There of course is a point to such assumptions; without faith of some kind, the world and all our endeavours could well seem purposeless, and our reason may not hold enough power to keep us from nihilism. Individual action is always toward some goal, but if our reason allows us to contemplate broader forms of action and existence that do not contain such purpose, there is a danger of discarding goals in all forms or deciding we can create our own. This is another problem inherent in deducing ends through the rational faculty; by placing emphasis on reason, and truth as discoverable by reason, Kant is placing the idea of objective truth within the mind, uniquely discoverable by the rational subject. Previously, attempts to understand the world and truth assumed that they could never be fully known, that the system, nature or god, were ultimately mysterious. It becomes dangerous to see truth as discoverable by reason, as it gives subjective ideas the potential power and authority of the absolute. Although there are certain flaws in Kant’s conception of mankind and nature, he holds a powerful argument for progress. The question is not whether he is right, but in what sense it becomes untenable to put knowledge (as the fulfillment of our capacities) over humanity, especially given that for Kant, humanity is the highest goal.

[11] Coined to stand in contrast to teleology, teleonomy is the quality of apparent purposefulness that derives not from an ideal end, but from the ability to adapt and evolve.

[12] It is also not unlikely that mankind is heading toward self-destruction; we may not, as Kant suggests, be eternal.