Dreaming the Future Closer

Just something I ran across last night:  

The Dahomean believes, and will say with conviction, that each narrative “history” is fixed and unique, both in form and content.  We tried the experiment of reading to a cult head two different versions of the myth giving the quarrel of the two brothers, Sogbo, the Thunder, and Sagbata, the Earth….The unhesitating reply was that the gods do not reveal the same things to everyone, and that each narrator was telling “true history” according to the way the vodun have given it to him.—Melville J. & Frances S. Herskovits, Dahomean Narrative (18)

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I’ve been reading Jacques Soustelle’s Daily Life of the Aztecs.  Besides making me sorely miss the days when scholars wrote with an easy, thorough learnedness, it provides a fascinating snapshot “of a civilization in in full progression,” of a city that was not “one of those rich, sophisticated and ossified cities which are the elegant tombs in which their own civilization stiffens as it dies” (33-34). 

It’s vibrant, but tangled, the unsettled problems of its ascension visible in its social structure.  What Soustelle details is not a unitary society joined by common interest, but a patchwork slowly being sewn together with conquest.  Of greatest interest to me at the moment, is the religious dimension of it. 

There’s a powerful war machine driving the empire, no doubt, with Uitzilopochtli, “solar god of war” (52-53), at its heart.  Like a proper war machine, though, it does not just serve the Mexica tribe at the center of the empire. It serves to bring in new blood (literally and figuratively) by granting any man within the expanding empire an opportunity for wealth and honor by serving the empire in war, by bringing captives for sacrifice. 

But then there Tlaloc, “the old rain-god and god of the farmer’s plenty” (53), who serves as the center of the agricultural world on which the military one depends.  Tlaloc is, symbolically at least, Uitzilopochtli’s equal, a second center around which the empire organized.  We see in Tlaloc’s presence the shape of the early empire, of the truce between soldier and peasant, even if at times that may have been a truce in the heart of a man who was both soldier and peasant.

More fascinating still, though, is the religious diversity that exists outside these two poles, in traditions that were maintained through lineage rather than warrior prowess.  The pochteca, the traders affliliated with largest corporate commercial ventures, “had their own gods, their own feasts, and they worshipped in their own manner, for during their long journeys they had no priests but themselves” (61).

The craftspeople, from diverse and sometimes recently conquered cities, in turn held their own traditions.  The goldsmiths had “Xipe Totec” with his own temple, “Yapico” (67).  The featherworkers, too, “held their own feast…of their local god and of the four other gods and two goddesses of their guild” (68). 

The spiritual diversity reflected a cultural diversity, the relative independence of different ritual practitioners from each other a sign of the relative degree of integration of the group within the empire.  But what I find most interesting is that the most intensely imperial face of Aztec religion was also the most open, the most permeable, the most ‘democratic.’

The imperial religion, embodied most clearly in Uitzilopochtli and Tlaloc were democratic, open and appealing to the citizenry as a whole.  A commoner, dedicated to the flowery war of Uitzilopochtli, could rise up in the society.  Tlaloc’s worship, for those who did not gain military fame and wealth, supported their basic life’s work: working the land. 

They also served as two centers around which the worship of other gods and goddesses became imperial.  The temple quarter of Tenochtitlan saw the two temple overseeing a much larger network of worship that was, through its association with the growing administrative complexity of the city, more ‘democratic.’  The imperial religion, like the society as a whole, became less about a shared blood lineage than about a shared investment in the success of the empire.

I suspect, in contrast, the less integrated, less imperial, aspects of religion, the lineage-centric faiths of the traders, of the craftsman, were not thereby static by comparison.  But they could only grow through an extension of kinship, of marriage and adoption (and the many variations of fictive kinship).

And yet, in the wake of the Aztec Empire’s rapid demise, it is not the imperial faith that survives.  It’s the local faiths, the faiths of isolated tribes never conquered by the Aztecs, and the faith of the lineage lines, that remain and survive. 

The dwindling traditionalism described by Stanzione in Rituals of Sacrifice has clear ties to the sort of religion Soustelle describes among the pochteca.  Because it is smaller, because it depends less on the success of an empire, it endures beyond it.  Many such traditionalisms did just die out, like the Aztec’s imperial faith, but, still, some did not.  Some survived and adapted.  And yet, the empire’s existence provided an important, perhaps essential, medium through which to proliferate.

There’s something really interesting there, though I’m not quite ready to make sense of what that is.  I just want to flag that, set the bookmark to come back to this. 

In Straw Dogs, Gray quotes Schopenhauer from On the Basis of Morality:

“I should liken Kant to a man at a ball, who all evening has been carrying on a love affair with a masked beauty in the vain hope of making a conquest, when at last she throws off her mask and reveals herself to be his wife” (37)

It’s a good quote, I would say a ‘true’ fable.  But both Schopenhauer and Gray seem unable to crack open its hard outer shell to enjoy the meaty nut contained within.  They think Kant laughable, worthy of derision, for being so foolish as to spend so much time chasing after what was already his.

But imagine that this story is not in the mouth, the pen of bitter Schopenhauer, sitting, lonely, in his study with his dog Atman at his feet.  Strip away the cynical laugh he is having at the ‘old fool.’  Instead, imagine Kant telling this story, his wife at his side, in a warm drawing room, with an old friend fresh from the dusty road to Konigsberg. 

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To every age its false idols, right?  We have to take care, of course, because the term comes loaded with implications, but its rich for that context.

We also need to be careful because, as much as I like the easy periodization, it’s not the case that one false idol simply disappears to be replaced by another.  The problem is more one of quality, of certain kinds of false idols playing a more prominent role in some times, in some places, than others.

One of our premier false idols: objectivity.  The idea of objectivity is noble and high, but the idol that has been made of it can be ugly, seductive, and destructive.  As an idol, those who rally to it believe they can lay claim to an objective truth proven by others that they can apply, almost without thought, to any situation.

Objectivity in its true, noble, form, is all about the struggle to extract from our personal struggles a lesson, a counsel, which we can offer up to another person.  It is about finding what is not just personal in our lives.  But that objectivity is passionately aware of how situated its counsel is.  It does not rule but speaks wisely.

Because being objective demands attempting to identify, to the best of your capacities, the real place from which and in which you speak.

Good science is objective in this way: here are these experiments, here are these labors, learn from them, learn how and when their lessons can be best applied.

False objectivity takes on the voice of absolutism, not speaking to but giving orders, imperative.  Those who follow this idol do not listen but demand to be listened to, they cite sources without reflection, trying to bolster their authority by proving their loyalty to their idol, objectivity.

Because false objectivity does not attempt to objectively understand its own position.  In not looking at its real place, it cannot appreciate the possible limits of the advice it comes to offer.

For this reason, false objectivity tends to swing between two kinds of lies: it either manically overapplies the advice it has to offer, conflating its truths for Truth or it veers into depressed nihilism, nothing is true or everything is true relativism.

It shows when we find people who claim to be counsellors speaking to those they counsel from scripts, when we find them working upon those who come to them, rather than listening to them, offering up what people have distilled into scripts, and then talking beyond those scripts.

We find it in the rabid atheist who denies others their experience of the divine, who reduces it to what is only one account of what goes on in the brain.  We find it in the fanatic who refuses to hear the sincerity, the humility, of someone who worships differently than them.  We find it among technicians who cannot see beyond the mechanics of their domain to the society it serves. 

Deleuze is fond of the phrase, “to be done with the judgment of God.”  This does not necessarily entail being done with either judgment or divinity.  It demands only that we cease to project ourselves into the position of “God.”  More than one soul who has abandoned God has not abandoned the position of absolute judgment.

And, luckily, we have those who, honoring the immensity of the divine and sacred world, have abandoned the judgment of God, but not judgment.  Who, mindful of their small but real place in the world, have set out to speak truly, to judge according to their wisdom, aware that their wisdom is only informed by the divine, not identical to it.

I’ve been reading fiction, a bit of a rarity for me.  In this case, it’s the Dark is Rising sequence by Susan Cooper.  It’s well-written and, for the most part, well-executed.  But it’s not really the fiction per se that has me thinking.

What I like most about the story is not the trappings of the fantasy genre, the great magical powers, the encounters with big, powerful beings.  It’s the smaller descriptions, the way she dwells on the magic that seems real to me.

Like the making of the Greenwitch.  She discusses the women coming together, constructing it, the sense of awe and power that is bound up with its creation and its sacrifice.  The construction, not the later appearance of it in full monster mode, touches on what is real and true to me in many so-called ‘polytheistic’ faiths. 

It’s the magic of time, of repetition, of an event that draws its past to itself, not revealing it as one great history of details, but as an affective charge, mysterious and true.

Which gets me to the question of unity, of the One.  I have a tendency to think of it in very material terms, like the unity of a brick, solid and unmoving.   Not just me, either.  The work of Parmenides, with its play of Being and Becoming, is very much about the struggle to come to terms with what the One is, along with a sense that what is one does not change.

Like the brick: it may be broken apart into the many, losing its unity.

But there are other unities that I want to remind myself of, through which I might ward away a too quick notion of unity.

Unities of fire, of water.  The way flames flicker dance, remain one even as they are in constant contact with each other.  The way water flows, in constant, moving, relation to itself, the way it is taken up in a greater movement.  Shore and ocean, air and ocean, in constant codetermination.  One and changing.

Then there are unities of time, of the fire’s spark.  The fires born of the sparks are ‘one’ through time with the parent fire, a unity of family and effect. 

And there is that unity of repetition, of the dense allegiance between events repeated over time, of the Greenwitch sort, where the unity is like a needle and thread through folds of fabric, a tugging that pulls moments into contact.

That’s a very difficult and often inchoate unity, where the One and the Many pull close and stumble apart.  There is no easy categorical description to be had, only an unsure naming. 

This is what makes sense and fills out a caution of blurring together a spirt under a single name.  The experience is too blurred to give any name full purchase, yet too personal for us not to struggle toward a name. 

It is a naming of prayer that does not reduce to the naming of a catalog.  It’s amorphous, one, many, like shadows moving on a wall, blending and separating.  A different notion, too, of truth, a truth of the calling, a truth judged by what it calls forth, by what responds to it.

Reading over what I have written in the last bit, I am finding a pretty clear common thread:

Let’s be suspicious of the words we have to talk about faith.  Let’s be suspicious of the conceptual halo those words bring with them, the assumptions that are so integral to them that we frequently take them for granted.

More than anything, I’m setting up some flags, realizing that Christianity has a deep and profound influence on the discourse about religion in general.  They are deep enough that they cut across and into discourses that are explicitly trying not to be Christian.

I think, too, there is this suspicion that, deep down, the conceptual apparatus may also be bad for Christians, thatit may not be unproblematic for them to use it just because it emerged from ‘their’ discourse. 

That discourse has developed ‘internally,’ as an exercise in logic and coherence, not just as a reflection of a particular mode of relating to the spiritual world.  As it develops as an object of thought, it lost a lot of its morring in practice.  There’s much that can be reclaimed now, much that can have practical import, but mostly insofar as it is freed from the broader conceptual apparatus.

Over here, I talked about this notion of seeing myself as one among others.  This is more a note to myself in public, so forgive its sketchiness.

That ‘one among others’ feeling may be well-explained by Deleuze’s notion of the ‘fourth person plural’ that he talks about in The Logic of Sense.  Which suggests a route into Deleuze that is a little perverse to his own work, a little more spiritual, a little more humanistically socially conscious. 

It also suggests a route out of Deleuze’s work which feeds into a broader discussion of ethics and social conscience.  One that brings us back to the person, not in order to reify the abstractions we have about ‘persons,’ but in order to return us to the lived knot of our own individuality. 

It’s just an individuality that is already riddled with the impersonal as well as the personal of the other.  This strike me as an important disctinction.  It isn’t just about the personal vs. impersonal, human vs. inhuman, but about the sort of personal and human we are talking about. 

We want to get to a humanity that is not the possession of any one person or person, as opposed to leaping quickly from the notion of a personal person (and the corruption it exerts on complicated ideas like divinity and the social) into an inhuman, almost mechanical world.

When I read Deleuze’s personal trajectory, I think he may have made exactly this too-quick leap from the ‘68 years to the early ’70’s work with Guattari.  While I have read much, much less of Guattari’s trajectory, I see less of this too quick leap in what I have read. 

This is from a notebook I used to carry around with me to write about what I was thinking about. The entry is dated November 30, 2004. There are good ideas here, ideas I would still endorse in some form or another. But it’s been a while since I really cared so much about these sorts of things as I do in this entry, and that makes me a little sad. I have left the inconsistencies of the original (typos and all) since they, too, seem part and parcel of that enthusiasm. Here it is:

A Brief Note on Sense & Reference: Too many put too much weight on the divergence of the two. At base, sense guarantees reference—a sensible phrase always has a referent, even if that referent is a fictional being (“fictional” opposing “real” only in common parlance, not in the metaphysical/ontological sense established in the “sense/reference paradox”). “The present king of France is bald” makes perfect sense and refers to an ontologically real entity (i.e. the fictional character “the present King of France”).

Consider Jed, “a poor mountaineer who could barely keep his family fed.” The story about Jed both makes sense and refers!

This goes some way to laying the framework for a public philosophy of exemplarity.

Notes toward teaching—Make clear the technical & general uses of a term so that students are prepped for vocabulary pluralism.

Emphasize the distinction between “brilliance” (rapid deployment of intellectual schema) and “wisdom” (slow, comparative work that ferrets out “deep” similarities without collapsing the compared into a single category)—especially in a 101-style course, grade according to the student’s effort toward engaging in such comparisons, even if it results in less clearly “brilliant” pieces.

Back to Sense & Reference: where reference becomes less clear, so does sense & vice versa. Sense “secures” the space for referred entities, so that the weakening of their clarity cannot but entail a corresponding loss of sense, just as a blurring of “sensible” categories makes reference more difficult. Sometimes, this blur grows into a full extension of sense, sometimes it collapses into babble, sometimes it remains unstable. (Todorov’s fantastic read back into discourse as a whole—consider “alternative logics” as attempts to claim (stretch) sense).

This is not new—it distills much of what I consider best in Deleuze—The Logic of Sense & What is Philosophy? with Guattari. The introduction of fictional entities opens the door to deeper appreciation of related (but not identical cases) to aesthetic entities, theoretical entities…and philosophic entities. But, unlike D&G, the concept need not be the primary vehicle—ethical vignettes, thought experiments, etc. are not necessarily “concepts” but nonetheless are philosophical entities. If anything, the traditional division of art, science, and philosophy may be too big, still too analogical and not comparative enough. We must move lower to appreciate the entities like Jed, Present King of France, Quarks, Superstrings, thought experiments, casuistry-crafted analogues, etc.

In this lies a criticism of so-called “interdisciplinary” work—the notion of inter-disciplinary does not go quite where we need to be—it sustains the disciplines when it should generate a space where disciplinary boundaries blur. These occur mostly at “sub-disciplinary” levels, where the topic should not “x object” from several perspectives but ”x entity” as of families of entities whose similarities and (more importantly) differences form a field that exists in no discipline but enriches many. These entities may frequently demarcate disciplines, the differences between related entities an important factor in a particular disciplinary boundary. Such entities may also, though, move between disciplines, be shared by them. In such cases, a study of their different uses may be an important aspect of cataloguing them.

Such a study should be loath to quickly categorize certain things as lacking sense and reference. Musico-poetic uses of words as well as instrumental music do not have the sorts of s&r we readers are used to, but this does not have to equate to an absence. A piece of music deploys sense (chords, notes, etc) that establish and condition reference, just as certain kinds of experimental music stretch and distort those establishes patterns of s&r.

Sense and reference here become a certain kind of entity, a conceptual relative of Jed and present king of France, that makes such sub-disciplinary fields possible—establishing conditions that make comparative endeavors possible.

It may be possible to talk about “properly” philosophical applications of terms like these, of claiming philosophical privilege to these sub-disciplinary spaces. But this misses the point: philosophy has no special access qua discipline, although it might have an accidental local privilege based on historical circumstance. Philosophy may enter into such sub-disciplinary spaces & return to its “proper” bounds with new entities or a deepened sense of its own entities (“philosophy” too vague—not philosophy as some vaguely defined aggregate, but philosophy & historical points of interacting).

This model borrows some material from philosophic talk about “conditions of possibility,” but is clearly more historical and materialistic: not absolute conditions of possibility but very local examinations of family relations that illuminate regions of thought they make possible. They give weight to what Foucault wanted his genealogies & archaeologies to be (his claim you can do many archaeologies on the “same” material)—not final descriptions (ascriptions/inscriptions) of how things are, but discussions about the sorts of things we are interested in and how they enable us to talk to each other without simply asserting discursive primacy of our bailywick (hence why questions of what “our” archive is are nonsensical (pardon the pun)—an “archive” is simply a local, practical means of facilitating a discussion, not a “real” thing we unearth).

Note the way this makes standard exegesis of my “favorite” figures problematic—I am neither agreeing nor disagreeing with them in any easy manner, but using their work as inspiration, as partial steps toward my project. The “towards” is complicated, because I give their work an aim it may or may not have internally and use that to drive a series of conclusions, that are only partially theirs. I use the concepts of public philosophy, communication, and sense/reference issues to develop inconsistencies from their work, these inconsistencies providing the basis for an alternative formulation (mine) that solves them.

This is “unfair” in terms of adhering to their work, but essential for making use of a thinker. And it is only in use that we begin to really talk.

The work of “use” highlights the problems with any historical discourse that assigns figures to movements and schools. Those movements and schools can too easily elide the diversity of its members, of the uses to which they are put. They become dead litanies of dogma instead of occasions for communication & use.

When it comes to determining the ‘value’ of a humanities-driven education, we often end up with some platitudes about being well-rounded, of being ‘human,’ of developing critical thinking. 

While I think there are meaningful ways to flesh out these platitudes, they also obscure an important dimension and opportunity of a humanities education: it encourages people to think differently, to stretch their mind around foreign modes of thinking.

A common lament of a student taking these classes is that they have to read all this obscure or irrelevant people with crazy ideas.  The outrageous content of these ideas goes hand in hand with their being seen as irrelevant.  And, unfortunately, armed with the sort of platitudes already mentioned, we don’t get much beyond that attitude.

However, what needs to be remembered, is that crazy ideas can be contained within very innovative and powerful formal structures.  Assuming we aren’t just dealing with craziness pure and simple (which is fairly infrequent), as historians of ideas, philosophers, critical theorists, wehave the opportunity to unearth modes of relating information. 

Those modes of relating information are not entirely content-neutral, but nor are they content-determined.  Teaching students to interact with these ‘crazy’ ideas as forms of rationality is an education in not just critical thinking, but creative thinking.

While I would not want to reduce the mission of the humanities to teaching this ‘creative thinking,’ we do a disservice to it by not elaborating more clearly the benefits of it, by not encouraging it as a virtue among scholars and students alike.

Dated 11/28/2005 (Edited to clean up a few typos) 

Rereading Adorno and Benjamin has brought to mind several important things.  First and foremost, that a philosophical account must not rest entirely upon an account of the subject, of the subject’s relationship to the world.  It must encompass the objective and not merely as the shadow of the subject’s actions. Second, that so much modern philosophy does just this, dwelling upon the ceaseless permutations of the Other rather than taking the steps required to place the self and other in the broader field of objects.  This lack of placement gives the Other and Self no content, makes of them empty forms that can sustain both too much (i.e. support multiple contradictory alternatives) and too little (provide no means for selection between competitors).  It strikes me that Deleuze, too, has some savviness in this regard, a concern for the object that is not reduced to the subject, although pursued quite differently.

It would be meaningful, I think, to revisit some of the ’sexy’ elements of Deleuze’s thought—the mistake many make with them may be the manner in which they eagerly seek a human, subjective face for them, entirely ignoring the way in which the model reaches out to highlight the ‘reality’ of the object—masochism not just as the relation of self and other, servant and mistress (as early Deleuze) but as an effort by the masochist to situate himself or herself among the world of objects, to speak to them in their own tongue, if you will.