Technologies of Sin & Salvatation:
Capital & Technologies of Meaning in the Age of the Perpetual Innovation Economy
Chapter
Four
A
RETURN TO BEAUTY
In
the Aesthetic State everything-even the tool which
serves-is a free citizen, having equal rights with
the noblest; and the mind, which would force the patient
mass beneath the yoke of its purposes, must here first
obtain its assent.
Friedrich
Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man
Truth
is beauty and beauty truth,
That is all ye know on Earth and all ye need to know
John
Keats, Ode on a Grecian Urn
As
individuals express their life, so they are.
Karl
Marx, German Ideology
IN
18TH AND 19TH CENTURY EUROPE, Western theories of value and meaning took a dramatic
turn toward a concern with earthly human experience.
The aesthetic reformulations by philosophers such
as Schiller, together with the bold political-economic
formulations of Marxian thought, signaled the advent
of a sweeping epistemological revolution, proposing
radically new intersections of imminent lived experience
and the transcendent powers of truth and authority.
Many of these nascent Western visions of an embodied
epistemology took aesthetics as both their driving
method and metaphor. Others sought to adopt or co-opt
the empirical methods and increasingly dominant metaphors
of techno-scientific "progress." Of course,
the scholars of this period were hardly the first
to seek to imagine and define that nexus of the virtual
and the natural where humankind might find a happier
union and more fully human state of existence. Those
such as Protagoras of Attica and the Vedic sages of
the Ganges had arrived at this juncture several millennia
earlier. In Greece, Protagoras' premises were trivialized
and dismissed by Socrates and Plato. In Asia, however,
early insights into such a holistic theory of meaning
took firm root and flourished. From the most ancient
recorded Hindu speculations dating from around 3000
BC, to the concise articulations of Nagarjuna in the
2nd century, the meticulous development of such grounded
conceptual frameworks and techniques had long been
at the center of these cultures' focused ontological
and epistemological inquiries. Equipped with this
legacy, the peoples of ancient Asia long ago began
the important work of testing, disseminating and evolving
their sophisticated and uniquely durable eco-cognitive
technologies. These have included those forms of Yoga
and Mahayana Buddhist practice discussed in the previous
chapter which have survived the experiential test
of generation upon generation of men and women up
to and including present scientific scrutiny.
____These
developments predated by thousands of years the speculations
of 18th and 19th century scholars such as Burke, Hume,
Kant, Schiller, Hegel, Schopenhauer and Marx, who
lived during a time of acute epistemological and ontological
crisis. The task thrust upon these scholastics and
their contemporaries was nothing less than to realign
the entrenched Platonic and Cartesian conceptions
of hypostatic and disembodied meaning with immense
and plainly visible shifts in the sociotechnical and
existential, embodied realities concomitant with the
new Industrial Age.
____For
the profound transformations of the Industrial Revolution
finally sparked that existential crisis in Europe
which effectively forced the West down the path toward
a newly embodied, ecological epistemology. For many
Western scholars living in that historical moment,
this was sublimely uncharted territory. Standing before
the yawning chasm between rationalism and empiricism,
between the transcendent mind and the fallen flesh,
these individuals sought solace in cognitive schema
such as the "Sublime and the Beautiful,"
"The Aesthetic State," the "Transcendent
Ideal," the "Absolute Spirit." It was
Marx, however, who eschewed the ontological compromises
offered up by his colleagues' theories and methods.
He sought instead a far more radically embodied theory
of meaning explicitly designed to ameliorate the intensified
reality of human alienation in a thoroughly grounded
notion of the self-production of the human species
through labor. Indeed Marx' writings on the uniquely
human ontogenesis of meaning through production and
consumption arguably provided the basis for the West's
first genuinely humanist notion of a truly integrative
aesthetic, as well as a fully embodied, ecological
epistemology. Such a theory of value and meaning was
so profoundly revolutionary in the Western context
that it was perhaps inevitable that it would spawn
a plethora of externalities which Marx could neither
have anticipated nor intended. But be that as it may,
in this present study of the aesthetic and alienating
dynamics of human technologies, Marx must figure heavily.
____After
describing these early, urgent days of theoretical
grounding and redirection, we move on to seminal works
during the late 19th and the 20th centuries by scholars
such as Dewey, Husserl, Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty
in setting the stage for the current convergence of
ancient Eastern precepts and contemporary Western
cognitive science. We will then be prepared to propose
one formulation of such a confluent conceptual framework,
as well as a specific methodology blending traditional
and novel, quantitative and qualitative processes
consonant with this extruded conception of meaning.
Following this will be presented several case studies
testing the applicability of the framework and method.
. . .
Newly
vital visions of the sublime and the beautiful, art
and aesthetics provided for many 18th and 19th century
scholars that hopeful intersection between autonomous
subjectivity and the larger subjective authority of
the increasingly mechanized and disruptive social
transformations of that time. These were-and yet remain-rather
radical propositions. For Socrates, Plato and Aristotle,
the valuation of such an existential aesthetic sensibility
would have been anathema to the social order they
sought through their emphasis on elite discourse,
geometric ratiocinations and fixed forms. As well,
Augustine had similarly prescribed a static sacramental
conduit between the distinctly opposed realms of sacred
truth and lived human experience in the form of the
Roman Catholic Church. Eighteenth and 19th century
Europe, however, became the arena for a sudden and
often conflicted turning toward the aesthetic as its
integrative metaphor and method, mending this traditional
ontological bifurcation. The seminal philosophers
of this period, including Burke, Hume, Kant, Schiller,
Hegel and Schopenhauer, all demonstrated in their
writings a deep concern with and commitment to the
role of the sublime and the beautiful in the attainment
of knowledge and truth. I want to argue that this
was largely a result of the European individual's
newly problematic and estranged relationship with
the natural world at the dawn of the Industrial Age-as
the steam-breathing machines and products of the sociotechnical
realm demanded ever more intensified, embodied devotion
in the form of political-economic production and consumption.
I believe this aesthetic turn was the inevitable epistemological
manifestation of a newly felt existential imperative
to overcome the perceptual and cognitive errors which
had drawn such concerted and sustained focus in the
East beginning 4000 to 5000 BC.
____From
the 18th century on in the development of Western
theories of meaning, it was no longer practicable
that Europe avert its gaze from the pervasive and
acutely perceived repercussions of what Turner has
described as the "staggering mistake … made
two and a half millennia earlier of trivializing the
premise of Protagoras." Europe's sometimes romantic
thrall with the healing powers of the sublime and
the beautiful represented the West's earliest major
attempt to craft a theory of meaning-situated within
a newly expansive sphere of inquiry-more conducive
to a rapprochement between mind and body, mind and
nature, man and machine. This was a compelling clarion
call to reintegrate the life world with the systems
world in a way that might free rather than constrain
human experience and possibility. With Judeo-Christian
authority increasingly displaced from its Medieval
role as final arbiter and primary cohesive force in
maintaining social order, and with the sweeping existential
transformations brought on by the steady ascendance
of capital and accelerating industrialization, the
great scholars of Europe were obliged to address the
glaring gap between the human subject and both the
natural and created object.
____If
Plato is said to be the "father of philosophy,"
Augustine the "father of Christian theology,"
and Descartes the "father of modern philosophy,"
this is arguably because each of these men most successfully
articulated and delineated the "logical"
extremes of the West's disembodied and flattened sphere
of rationalistic inquiry. Yet, as I have argued previously,
these theories of meaning were not born in a vacuum,
but were developed and adapted by living, breathing
individuals situated within specific historical moments.
Aside from the impressive persistence of these epistemological
schemas, it is clear that the natural and built environments
within which they have been employed have altered
dramatically since their inception. We know, for instance,
that the Greeks' existential context shaped in fundamental
ways their visions of epistemological and ontological
possibility. As well, the turbulent realities of Augustine's
day, together with his long association with Neoplatonism
prior to his conversion, undoubtedly impacted the
focus, intent and eventual form of those institutional
schematizations which would come to define the functional
parameters of Christian theology. It was the sudden
tectonic sociotechnical shifts wrought by the Industrial
Revolution just over two centuries ago, however, which
would wield the most profound and widely felt impacts
to the Western individual's life and livelihood. Scholars,
statesmen, poets and painters gave voice to the West's
inevitable apprehension of these abrupt and vivid
changes in the form and content of human experience
in the industrialized urban factory-and specifically
the alienating affects on the human soul. These sudden
existential transformations in the real, tangible
interactions of the individual with the objects of
the built and natural environments drove Western epistemology's
belated turning to the fact of human embodiment and
its awakening to the possibilities manifest in a profoundly
and genuinely integrative aesthetic.
____A
growing number of contemporary scholars have noted
the tremendous relevance of this period today because
of the remarkable foreshadowing which that first Industrial
Revolution offers of our own current era (see, for
example, Hardt, Negri, Levy, Czitrom). And so, just
as we look to the Greeks to grasp the foundations
for our Western conceptions of meaning and value,
we look to the seminal thinkers of 18th and 19th century
Europe to perceive the means by which the sphere of
inquiry was renegotiated to map onto Europe's new
ontological realities, the revolution in human experience
occurring everywhere these scholars turned their gaze.
____It was in Kantian
thought that the two Western paths of rationalism
and empiricism appeared to first, finally converge
in a single epistemology. Kant accepted that the basis
of reason must be found in experience. However, he
refused to accept that embodied experience might be
the sole source of knowledge and meaning. As he said:
"Though all our knowledge begins with experience,
it does not follow that it all arises out of experience."
Kant argued rather that true meaning arises in those
moments when the logical faculties of rationalism
and the sensory perceptions which dictate empirical
understanding combine in a particular manner of experience.
Yet, in his unique synthesis of "transcendental
idealism," Kant argued that the human individual
could only ever know the "phenomenon" or
sensory perception of the actual "transcendental
object" or "thing in itself," which
lies far beyond any actual human experience. This
was clearly a bow to Plato's contention that dialectical
ratiocination provided the only means by which humans
might point to the perfection of that distant realm
of Ideas and Forms.
____Kant's
aesthetics also betray his fondness for the a priori,
further limiting the usefulness of his epistemology
in our current political-economic and environmental
context. As the consensus "father of modern aesthetics,"
Kant rejected Plato's damning appraisal of art and
aesthetics. Yet his emphasis on the form of art aspiring
to pre-given, universal ideals of beauty, as well
as his insistent separation of "disinterested"
aesthetic appraisal from moral or pragmatic considerations,
reveal his aesthetic theory as shaped by both Plato's
conception of a priori transcendent forms and by Aristotle's
passive appraisal of the object. In short, Kant's
exercise in epistemological and ontological integration
does not go nearly far enough for our modern purposes.
His aesthetics (like his morality) hinge upon the
otherworldly notion of a static, transcendent ideal.
Just as with Plato's divine Forms, Kant's "aesthetic
form" strives forever toward a vanishing point
of moral and aesthetic perfection, which is to say
its "Transcendent Ideal." And for this reason,
his epistemology is of limited use in moving us toward
a fully integrative methodology for understanding
our imminent technologies of meaning.
____Several
decades later, and very much bathed in the full aura
of the Industrial Revolution, Schiller articulated
his influential vision of an "Aesthetic State."
Here, it is possible to see clear signs of the West's
awakening to the notion that art's 'instrumental'
quality lies not in its imperfect earthly rendering
of an ideal otherworldly form, but rather as the only
genuine means to ameliorate the false projection of
such cognitive-alienating schisms. For Schiller, the
Aesthetic State provided that neutral intersection
(or middle path) between the individual and the increasingly
mechanized authority of the many. In On the Aesthetic
Education of Man, he proposed a therapeutic turn to
the aesthetic to "restore … the totality
of our nature." In view of the Western epistemological
context in which Schiller composed his works, his
vision can only be seen as a radical departure and
bold affirmation of the individual's salvation through
art. Indeed, more than any other European philosopher,
Schiller may be most responsible for holding out art
and aesthetics as the indispensable key to reconciling
the West's entrenched epistemological oppositions
of reason and feeling, duty and desire. Yet in this
same work, Schiller himself posed the question, "But
does such a State … really exist? And, if so,
where is it to be found?" His own efforts to
respond to this uncertainty suggests a place so private,
rarefied and pure, that the reader is left standing
at the shadowy edge of what we are assured is a bright
and promising vision:
As
a need it exists in every finely attuned soul; as
a realized fact, we are likely to find it, like the
Church and the pure Republic, only in some few chosen
circles, where conduct is governed, not by some soulless
imitation of the manners and morals of others, but
by the aesthetic nature we have made our own; where
men make their way, with undismayed simplicity and
tranquil innocence, through even the most involved
and complex situations, free alike of the compulsion
to infringe the freedom of others in order to assert
their own, as of the necessity to shed their Dignity
in order to manifest Grace.
____And
so, though Schiller referred to "education"
in the title of his most influential aesthetic treatise,
he unfortunately put forward no method, pedagogical
or otherwise, to unlocking and entering into this
space of aesthetic reconciliation.
____But
the role of art and aesthetics was to lose ground
once again in the epistemology propounded by arguably
the most influential scholar of the 19th century.
Hegel roundly rejected Kantian transcendental idealism
and particularly his predecessor's proposition of
the "thing in itself." Instead, he argued
that both mind and matter are derived from the "Absolute
Spirit" through the universal, rational process
of dialectic. Hegel's own revision of the Platonic
dialectical method consisted of the dynamic interplay
between thesis, antithesis and synthesis, which he
argued, weeds the irrational from human cognition,
and strives toward the ultimately clairvoyant vision
and realization of the rational. For Hegel, knowledge
begins with sensory perception, which becomes more
rational through the dialectical purification of sense
perception. Humankind's aim is thus ultimately to
attain that level of self-knowledge of the Absolute
Spirit.
____With
regard to his aesthetics, Hegel has commonly-and erroneously-been
grouped together with Schiller and Schelling as regarding
art as the highest form of human activity. It is true
Hegel applauded Schiller for recognizing art's role
in effecting "unity and reconciliation"
between the conflicting aspects of human experience
so pronounced in industrialized German society. Yet
Hegel also criticized Schiller's failure to impose
further teleological imperatives on what he argued
to be the proper and necessary function of aesthetics.
Schiller had written that it is "only through
beauty that man makes his way to freedom," and
proposed that, through the cultivation of the subjective
aesthetic, the individual is empowered to make his
way with "undismayed simplicity and tranquil
innocence" amidst the cacophonous demands of
Modern existence. Hegel, on the other hand, argued
that Schiller had failed to see the essential telos
of serious art, insisting that all beauty was the
"sensible manifestation of the Idea," that
ultimate, rational reality which Hegel believed to
govern and give meaning to all human experience. For
Schiller, the purpose of art and aesthetics was rooted
in emergent experience, providing that crucial point
of conciliation between individual vision and the
panoptic vision of cultural authority. For Hegel,
by contrast, the telos of all art and beauty lay in
its pre-rational role in manifesting the Idea and
Absolute Spirit. Further, though Hegel is commonly
credited for suggesting that, together with philosophy
and religion, art belongs to the realm of Absolute
Spirit, he was quite explicit in stating that art
is inferior to those other means by which God is said
to reveal himself to humankind. In fact, he went so
far as to state that "art has ceased to be the
extreme need of the spirit" as it had been in
an earlier, less rational era. The arrival of the
Age of Reason, he held, had signaled art's inevitable
irrelevance and eventual departure. Art, Hegel wrote,
was finally "coming to an end." Indeed,
in the late 19th century, he claimed it had already
become "a thing of the past." Thus, in Hegel's
profoundly influential epistemology, the West was
once again cast back into a theory of transcendent
meanings and a priori origins. Here, art does not
so much reconcile mind and body and nature, but rather
(for the time being) seeks and serves the higher purposes
of a pure and transcendent Ideal. Again, hope for
an aesthetic, integral relationship of human cognition,
embodiment and environment seemed to be dashed against
the bulwark of preternatural Western Reason. Imminence
had again come to serve transcendence. Emergence crawls
from the shadows toward the light of static value
and meaning.
____Yet
it is important to note that Hegel's thought was sufficiently
complex to hold a great many ironies and sizable paradoxes.
He offered aesthetics as one of precious few paths
to Absolute Spirit, though he announced the end of
art. And, though he devoted his career to invoking
the presence of a final, fixed point of unpolluted
reason, he also condemned the human propensity to
hypostasize its cognitive constructs. Indeed, in a
passage quoted earlier, he coined the term entfremdung
(alienation), sowing a pivotal insight in Western
philosophy and political economic theory: "What
the mind really strives for is the realization of
its notion," Hegel wrote in his Philosophy of
History. "But in doing so it hides that goal
from its vision and is proud and well satisfied in
this alienation from its own essence." Of course,
one individual more than any other fixed upon this
critical insight and devoted his career to addressing
its Modern manifestations in the age of capital's
rapid industrialization.
____Whatever
epithets have been applied to Marx, there can be no
doubt that, in elucidating the sources of alienation
in Modern political economy and in prescribing his
ultimately incendiary solution, he carried out the
most explicit and ambitious re-envisioning and reintegration
of Western epistemology the West had seen since Socrates
and Plato dismissed such a theory of value and meaning
two thousand years earlier. Marx's provocative thought
involved a carefully selective synthesis of Kant's
transcendental idealism, Hegel's dialectical dynamics,
and the most advanced social and physical sciences
of his day. Yet he specifically refuted Kant's transcendentalism,
as well as Hegel's abstract invocation of Absolute
Spirit and other transcendental aspects of his philosophy,
as he found these to be impediments to explaining
the dynamic, interactive relationship of the living
individual and his environment. In Marx's thought
perception is reborn as vital, co-creative interaction
between the subject (knower) and the object (the known).
For Marx, humankind is characterized by the "principle
of movement" which is to be understood not mechanically,
but as a creative vitality, what Alexander terms eros.
Human passion for Marx "is the essential power
of man striving energetically for its object."
In this newly dynamic framework of meaning, both knower
and known are in a constant and continual state of
mutual adaptation. The object is transformed in the
process of becoming known. As for the subject, value
and meaning are generated through the cognitive and
somatic process of acting in and on the world around
us. The validity of this knowledge and meaning are
then always, inevitably tested in the quality of the
lived moment of action and, specifically in labor.
That is, humankind's active, mutually creative engagement
with its environment.
____It
should be clear at this point that this view is remarkably
in tune with the most basic, driving tenets of Mahayana
Zen Buddhism. And, as I will show, such thinking also
clearly anticipated Dewey's conception of living art,
Merleau-Ponty's embodied phenomenology, as well as
recent findings in the cognitive sciences. The unmistakable
parallels between Marx's epistemological revolution
and these other theories of meaning-both ancient and
modern-become ever more extraordinary the more closely
one examines Marx' insights into labor and his prescriptions
for addressing what he perceived to be the core problem
of human alienation in capital's appropriation and
virtualization of value and meaning.
____It
is important here to recall that, though Marx offered
the West's fully articulated epistemology which directly
confronts the problem of alienation, the phenomenon
found its earliest expression in the Old Testament
in the concept of idolatry. The deadness and emptiness
of the idol is expressed in the Old Testament in the
passage: "Eyes they have and they do not see,
ears they have and they do not hear." As Fromm
noted, the essence of what the Judeo-Christian prophets
call "idolatry" is not that humankind worships
many gods rather than one. It is that the idols are
the work of humankind's own hands; they are things,
and humankind bows down and worships things-worships
that which he creates himself. In so doing, he transforms
himself into an alienated object. The individual transfers
to the object of his creation the life force which
originated in him, and instead of experiencing and
losing himself in the creative act of art, he is in
touch with himself only through the worship of the
idol.
The more man transfers his own powers to the idols,
the poorer he himself becomes, and the more dependent
on the idols, so that they permit him to redeem a
small part of what was originally his. The idols can
be a god-like figure, the state, the church, a person,
possessions. Idolatry changes its objects; it is by
no means to be found only in those forms in which
the idol has a so-called religious meaning. Idolatry
is always the worship of something which man has put
his own creative powers, and to which he now submits,
instead of experiencing himself in his creative act.
____Again,
among the extant forms of alienation, the most frequent
one is alienation in language and language's associated
cognitive schema. This is also Arendt's "metaphysical
fallacy." It is Dewey's "philosophical fallacy."
And it is cognitive error which has always been at
the root of "existential egotism," or what
the ancient Vedic sages identified as abidharma.
____It
is this conception of idolatry, cognitive error or
alienation which compelled Marx to conclude in Capital
that "As in religion man is governed by the products
of his own brain, so in capitalist production he is
governed by the products of his own hands." In
the current analysis, Marx's definition of "religion"
would extend to any and all epistemological frameworks
in which Ideas, Forms, Transcendent Ideals or other
cognitive constructs are said to be a priori and static
meanings. Later in Capital, Marx famously described
the transition from the old-world modes of "handicraft"
and "manufacture" labor with the suddenly
new and disruptive mode of factory labor which was
at that time rapidly supplanting the traditional forms
of production:
In
handicrafts and manufacture, the workman makes use
of a tool; in the factory the machine makes use of
him. There the movements of the instrument of labor
proceed from him; here it is the movement of the machines
that he must follow. In manufacture, the workmen are
parts of a living mechanism; in the factory we have
a lifeless mechanism, independent of the workman,
who becomes it mere living appendage.
In
his theory of meaning, Marx laid the foundations for
all later existentialist thinking in his analysis
of the alienation and automatization of humankind
in Western industrialism, which he observed in its
nascent, burgeoning form in 19th century Europe. This
humanist philosophy found its most explicit expression
in Marx's German Ideology and in his Economic and
Philosophical Manuscripts in which the central issue
is that of the existence of the individual human being,
who is what he does, and whose nature and meaning
reveals itself in history. Here, Marx states simply
and unequivocally that, "Consciousness can never
be anything other than conscious existence, and the
existence of men in their actual life-process."
It is thus the individual's active engagement with
the sociotechnical and natural objects of his environment
which gives shape to his thinking and desires. In
German Ideology Marx described this existential ontogenesis
of meaning clearly and concisely: "[Labor] is
a definite form of activity of … individuals,
a definite form of expressing life, a definite mode
of life on their part. As individuals express their
life, so they are. What they are, therefore, coincides
with their production, both with what they produce
and how they produce." Marx was strongly critical
of the then-prevalent notions of transcendental aesthetic
ideals and of art's aspiration toward Absolute Spirit
as advanced by Kant and Hegel respectively. Yet the
above statements could hardly be closer to the sentiments
of the Zen sages and poets. And in placing affective-embodied
experience at the center of the newly mechanized political
economy, he also anticipated the core dynamics of
the Affect Economy by nearly one hundred and fifty
years.
____And
so, in Marx's radically grounded epistemology, for
perhaps the first time since Protagoras, we find the
West's first unabashed, explicit claim that the human
individual creates meaning in the moment of full somatic
interaction with her environment. Suddenly, in Marx,
transcendent truth descends to Earth and becomes profoundly
imminent. Fixed forms metamorphose into emergent meanings
rooted in lived human experience. This is undeniably
the language of Protagoras and Nagarjuna. It is the
language of Dewey, Merleau-Ponty and today's cognitive
science. And it is also a language consonant with
today's perpetual innovation economy and its ever-growing
dependence on creative production, as well as ever
more powerful eco-cognitive technologies.
____Before
moving on to the 20th century, it will be helpful
to our later discussion of our evolving theories of
meaning in the contemporary political economy to point
to two closely-related amendments and updates to Marx's
conceptions of alienation specifically in relation
to technology.
____First,
Marx quite underestimated the progressive scientific
flattening of experience and the reach of alienation
in the evolution of industrialization. In Capital,
he wrote: "Within the capitalist system all methods
for raising the social productiveness of labor are
brought about at the cost of the individual laborer
… they estrange from him the … potentialities
of the labor process in the same proportion as science
is incorporated in it as an independent power."
Marx recognized what becomes of human needs functioning
within such a systems world, and he saw with nearly
prescient clarity the progression of this process
through to the present day. In his epistemological
framework, the focus of human activity must be redirected
"to the wealth of human needs, and consequently
also to a new mode of production and to a new object
of production," to "a new manifestation
of human powers and a new enrichment of the human
being." In the flattened, fragmented world of
alienation and idolized technologies, these needs
are no longer genuinely human. Need becomes the insatiable
accumulation of dead idols, rather than the creative
innovation of new meanings. The individual who has
become subject to the frozen, alienated object becomes
"a mentally and physically dehumanized being
… the self-acting and self-conscious commodity."
This commodity man-what Jung would later term the
"organization man"-relates to his environment
by having it and consuming it. Marx put it quite simply
and succinctly when he said, "The less you are,
the less you express your life, the more you have,
the greater is your alienated life…."
____The
necessary correction is this; Marx believed that the
working class was the alienated class and therefore
that freedom from alienation would occur with the
liberation of the working class. It may be, however,
that Marx did not fully grasp the depth to which the
condition of alienation is rooted in the most fundamental
dynamic of human cognition-the vital, dynamic relationship
of human and technology-which had given rise to the
very political economic manifestations so dramatically
apparent in Marx's time of manic industrialization.
Neither could he have foreseen the extent to which
alienation would come to dominate the labor and lives
of the rapidly expanding portion of the global population
who today manage and manipulate symbols and human
beings rather than the machines of Marx's day. These
symbol manipulators are hired not only for their skill,
but for all those personality qualities which make
them 'attractive personality packages,' easy to handle
and manipulate. They are the true "organization
men"-more so than the skilled laborer-their idol
being the corporation. Alienation and idolatry, however,
continue on their accelerating trajectory in such
an environment:
But
as far as consumption is concerned, there is no difference
between manual workers and members of the bureaucracy.
They all crave for things, new things to have and
to use … They are not related to the world productively,
grasping it in its full reality and in this process
becoming one with it; they worship things, the machines
which produce the things-and in this alienated world
they feel as strangers and quite alone.
____The
second and related amendment important here has to
do with the shifting relationship of man and machine
in the era of digital technology. As we have seen
previously, in an economy increasingly driven by the
innovation of new technologies, new "content,"
new meanings, our ancient and flattened methods of
ratiocination no longer suffice. The manifestation
of our internal cognitive realities in external digital
networks requires that embodied affect find its place
in our epistemologies just as it has in our emergent
political economic paradigm. This is because novel
human meanings, by definition, cannot emerge from
technologies of meaning shut off from affective embodiment.
And again, this fact has hardly gone unnoticed by
today's networks of capital accumulation. Content
today refers to all memetic and genetic dimensions
of cognitive and somatic meaning. The human subject's
relationship to its creations has not fundamentally
changed in this new technological environment. But
the issue has taken on an entirely new centrality
and urgency. The question today is whether we choose
to project an ancient Western epistemological bias
onto our global, digital networks of value and meaning
which has been shown to both deplete the human soul
and its environment. Or will we choose to build on
the Marx's epistemological revolution, consciously
extrude our sphere of inquiry, and resolve to evolve
fully embodied, ecological theories of meaning and
methods? The answer to this question is far from clear.
____By
any measure, Soviet, Chinese and other abuses and
misappropriations of Marxian thought over the past
150 years have proven disastrous to both the human
subject and its environment. In the capitalist economies
as well, the interim since Marx has been an unfortunate
time for the political economic manifestation of an
embodied, ecological theory of meaning. Accelerating
capital-driven production and hyper-consumption have
expanded globally and deepened the felt, existential
reality of both alienation and ecological degradation.
Yet seminal scholars of the 20th century, such as
Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Wittgenstein,
James and Dewey, devoted much of their respective
careers to placing the aesthetic co-creation and co-existence
of the human organism and its environment at the heart
of contemporary philosophical discourse. And through
the course of these most recent epistemological developments,
we also see an exponentially intensified correspondence
between Western theories of meaning and the venerable
epistemologies and methods of the East.
____By
the close of the 20th century, Marx's reformulation
of the parameters of the epistemological and ontological
sphere of inquiry had become almost universally adopted
in Western thought. It was as if, after two millennia
of wandering in the desert, Western philosophy had
found its bearings and was racing forward with a newly
invigorated and integral view of ontological possibility.
And this trajectory was increasingly aligned with
both Eastern philosophy and praxis. As Fromm has suggested,
philosophy in the West since Marx in many ways became
an existentialist rebuttal of the venerable dichotomies
and transcendental, otherworldly aspirations of earlier
theories of meaning. In the works of the American
Pragmatists, and most notably John Dewey, it may be
argued that this existentialist trajectory reached
its theoretical culmination, awaiting only the empirical
backing of today's ongoing cognitive, social and political-economic
research to finally emerge as the full modern-day
articulation of that embodied, ecological theory of
meaning first proposed by the likes of Protagoras
and Nagarjuna.
____In
the development of American Pragmatism, and in the
seminal works of scholars such as James, Dewey and
Mead, the American perspective began for the first
time to figure into Western epistemological explorations
in a profoundly meaningful manner. After Dewey in
particular, only those scholars who either chose to
stubbornly adhere to traditional Western dichotomies
such as mind and body, mind and nature, art and technology,
or were simply unaware of Dewey's stunning articulation
of integral and "consummatory" experience,
would henceforth be confined to previous epistemological
and ontological constraints. Dewey's conceptions of
art and technology cleared the way for later formulations
of embodied mind. They also laid the necessary theoretical
foundation for this book's formulation of the integrative
(eco-cognitive) and disintegrative (cognitive-alienating)
dimensions of all human constructs. As well, Dewey
was perfectly clear about the means and methods required
to apprehend and grasp these interdependent and complementary
forces.
____Toward
the end of a career of pioneering thought, and as
his culminant philosophical act, Dewey came to embrace
art and the aesthetic as that unique moment when the
quintessential need for human meaning and value are
satisfied. For Dewey, his writings on art and aesthetics
summed up "in itself all the issues which have
been previously considered." And, as we have
seen, in Art as Experience, he stated unequivocally
that the aesthetic theory of any philosopher "is
a test of the capacity of the system he puts forth
to grasp the nature of experience itself. There is
no test that so surely reveals the one-sidedness of
a philosophy than its treatment of art and aesthetic
experience." It is in this intensified focus
on art and aesthetics toward the end of his career
where we find Dewey's most explicit and powerfully
useful dissolution of classic European dualisms and
dichotomies into the complementary and mutually-dependent
forces so reminiscent of Eastern thinking. In Art
as Experience, Dewey argues that the pretence that
there is, on a "remote pedestal," a special
and separate class of "works of art" which
offer a sui generis mode of experience, constitute
an artificial category, a classification due not to
intrinsic, distinguishing qualities (as had been argued
by everyone from Kant to Bell), but to purely sociological
factors such as the institutionalism of museums and
private collecting of the aristocracy of old and modern-day
nouveaux riches. Dewey held that art embraces countless
human products, not just those canonized as works
of art. Importantly, Dewey also argued for the inclusion
of science and technology within the larger, encompassing
realm of such creative human artifacts. Similarly,
aesthetic experience, in Dewey, was finally integrated
and involved in all ordinary, mundane human activities-and
certainly not confined to the rarefied and artificially
separate realms of high art and high tech. In short,
Dewey's arguments dissolved the false, time-honored
distinctions between art (and technology) and daily,
lived experience.
____This
newly integral "continuity" of experience
was, of course, a decisive factor in Dewey's effective
dismantling of the venerable dualistic categories
upon which Western epistemology had built its theoretical
frameworks and methods for so long. Experience is
not for Dewey tied either to notions of introspective
analysis or empirical induction. Nor is it something
tied exclusively to "inner" sensation or
feeling. Experience, and certainly integral, consummatory
experience, must always be grounded in the social
and the event. It is this essential human experience
which will have a characteristic movement and "rhythm,"
that of "loss of integration with environment
and recovery of union." In this sense, the truly
"live creature" is always being challenged
by its unruly surroundings to act upon them, or reinterpret
them, so as to recover a sense of harmony with them.
In Dewey's insight into the human impulse to relieve
the tension of discord inherent in humanity's relationship
with its environment, lies "art in its germ."
For, in the fleeting sense of harmony, of things fitting
together with one another and oneself, resides aesthetic
pleasure in its broadest sense. When Dewey called
"the idea of art … the greatest intellectual
achievement in the history of humanity," he was
explicitly recognizing the act of making art in order
to produce harmony and union out of discord. And it
is just such aesthetic, creative labor which has always
been central to developing the "cognitive ecology"
which enables a more harmonious coexistence between
humanity and nature. Art in the narrower, conventional
sense is merely an especially focused and often contrived
form of the universal human aesthetic impulse. In
Deweyan thought, great, noted works of art are said
to successfully embody the achievement of harmony
and union. The works of a Bach or Monet exemplify
the successful culmination of these individuals' yearning
for "experience in its integrity" and which
all live creatures strive for in our daily creative
constructions and innovations-whether in our simple
conversations or in our more explicitly poetic efforts
and aspirations.
____The
only qualification I want to make here to Dewey's
dramatic, integrative reframing of the human aesthetic
impulse is simply this: art (and by extension technology),
in both its "securing" and "unsecuring"
dynamics, serves the task of manufacturing the full
ebb and flow of lived experience. This amendment is
merely to suggest that the paradoxical nature of successful
art will simultaneously deconstruct and transform
the sociotechnical schema from which it has emerged
in its subjectively unique figuration. Such a proposition
would be in keeping with Dewey's own conception of
"continuity." As Alexander has noted, continuity
is more that sheer identity or sameness in repetition.
There must be difference and identity in both the
subject and its aesthetic act, but it must grow out
of a prior condition. Both the aesthetic act and its
art product seek to create a space for resonant difference
while simultaneously embodying unity. If our newly
extruded epistemology is truly to encompass the full
ebb and flow of experience, then this super- or pre-rational
ambiguity must be embraced and articulated. Like the
elemental metaphor, technology generates both identity
and difference, unsecuring even as it innovates new
schematic platforms of value and meaning from which
new values and meanings may again be generated. This
is the essence of what Turner has termed "the
ontogenesis of meaning." It is also the core
dynamic of Varela's "codependent arising,"
and of the Zen Buddhists' "Middle Path."
And, as we have seen, in carefully contrived postmodern
settings, the market environment is manipulated to
provide both the alienating stimulant and the prescribed
solution in the commodity object.
____The
aesthetic act and its product which lean too far toward
the operational dynamic, of course, run the risk of
achieving not only the function of "securing,"
but also of alienation and fragmentation. As Marx
argued, a political economy which relies on the instrumental
mode of production and consumption in order to sustain
itself perpetuates (and indeed requires) the condition
of alienation. And it was Dewey who added that an
epistemology or mode of thinking which leans too heavily
toward the operational runs the very real and dangerous
risk of constructing cognitive, linguistic, social
and material artifacts which perpetuate only alienation,
and fragmentation, and which ultimately eliminate
the possibility for value and meaning.
____Dewey
may well have been the first among 20th century existentialist
thinkers to foresee the full human and social impacts
of such an alienating mode of thought. Where Marx's
eye was focused for most of his career on the political
economic dynamics of industrialization and the technology
of capital, Dewey's lifelong placement of human experience
and education at the core of his epistemological formulations
meant that he would eventually come face to face with
the diminishment of human potential due to the hyper-magnification
of the instrumental, rationalistic mode of thought
in Western thought and practice. The Western propensity
to seek the absolute in the hypostatization of meaning,
Dewey saw, had led to the 20th century manifest realization
of "disorganization" in countless sociotechnical
forms, from our educational institutions to our military
technologies of mass destruction. And so, in the revitalization
and reassertion of Art-or more precisely in the vital
aesthetic act-Dewey saw hope for a reestablished equilibrium
and return to health.
____Back
in Europe, Husserl and his most prominent students,
Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, must also figure prominently
in this account of the West's return to an aesthetic,
embodied and ecological theory of meaning. Husserl's
philosophy orbited around the relationship between
the cognate individual and his environment. His philosophical
inquiry into the interaction between the human subject
and objects in the world, of course, laid the foundation
for phenomenology. Husserl pointed to the gap between
the physical objectivism laid down in Aristotelian
thought manifested in modern science since Galileo,
and Kant's transcendental idealism, the roots of which
were in Socratic and Platonic thought. This, for Husserl,
highlighted the importance of making conscious, direct
experience the practical focus of philosophical inquiry.
Though Husserl's epistemology was not explicitly grounded
in political economic dynamics, he was clearly indebted
to Marx's existential emphasis. His narrower focus,
however, was rather on elucidating the interactions
between "pure consciousness" and objects
in the world. Such pure conscious, he suggested, could
be reached through a method of "phenomenological
reduction" by which all factual knowledge and
reasoned assumptions about a given phenomenon are
set aside so that pure intuition of its essence may
be brought forth and analyzed.
____Heidegger's
epistemology extrapolates from Husserl's phenomenology
in its intensified focus on what Heidegger termed
the Dasein, or "being in the world." Heidegger,
like his teacher Husserl, built directly upon Marx's
notion of existential labor, emphasizing, however,
that "practical behaviors or actions," such
as "producing something" or "having
to do with something," "must employ theoretical
cognition." Thus in Heideggerian thought, the
a priori status of the cognizing human individual
is subtly but firmly reestablished over the pre-cognate
existence or experience. Yet our Dasein exists in
active relationship with the objects of the world,
no longer a detached spectator in the Aristotelian
sense, but rather emergent through the dynamic interrelationship
of cognition and volition. In his lectures on the
Origin of the Work of Art, Heidegger provides a pivotal
deconstruction of Western notions of both art and
the technological artifact. These three lectures are
widely viewed as revolving around the problematic
of works of art and instrumental technology as means
by which Being "reveals" itself in history.
As earlier noted, however, Rutsky takes issue with
the convention of interpreting Heidegger's conceptions
of art and technology and the common English rendering
of the term Entbergung as "revealing." Rutsky
argues that a more accurate translation of the German
would be "unsecuring." Again, this issue
of interpretation is pivotal to this discussion because
it raises the possibility that Heidegger may have
first articulated the role technology serves in "unsecuring"
previously stable schema of knowledge and 'truth,'
and thus reopening the possibility for the dynamic
ontogenesis of human meaning. Whether or not Rutsky
is correct in his reinterpretation, and even regardless
of whether Heidegger could have anticipated such debate
over the implications of this concept, such discourse
among contemporary scholars itself serves as a crucial
opportunity for the articulation of an embodied, ecological
epistemology appropriate and useful to the emergent
global political economy. For, in the resonant new
meanings spawned by the 'cognitive technology' which
is Entbergung, Heidegger opened the way for a dramatic
further refinement of Marx's notion of embodied, environmental
existentialism providing a newly grounded sphere for
Western epistemological and ontological inquiry. Within
Heidegger's notion of Entbergung lies the seed of
a radically new perception of art and technology's
symbiotic relationship to humankind in the ongoing
ontogenesis of value and meaning which increasingly
underlies postmodern political economy. Heidegger
expressed his concern about the widespread lack of
non-operational thinking. He argued that "calculative
thinking" was indispensable in its limited sphere,
but that a reliance on this mode of thinking laid
humanity bare to being victimized by its own technological
creations. Here again one sees clear parallels to
both Buddhist notions of the roots of human suffering,
as well as Marxian conceptions of alienation. Unfortunately,
Heidegger's proposed responses to the dangerous shortcomings
of calculative thinking tend to be obscure and difficult
to discern, wrapped as they are within his famously
idiosyncratic formulations of notions and terms such
as Being and Entbergung, and his unique delineation
of "Being" in new and ambiguous categories
such as his "natural objects," "equipment,"
and "high art".
____Merleau-Ponty
took a more direct and explicit tact in arguing for
the centrality of embodied experience and perception
in epistemological discourse, reformulating Husserl's
phenomenology, as Galen Johnson notes, "By pushing
Husserl's remnant intellectualism based on the primacy
of consciousness downward toward a new philosophy
of the human body" (1993, 9). By "perception"
Merleau-Ponty referred to our kinesthetic, pre-scientific
lived-bodily presence in the world. Merleau-Ponty's
direct and unambiguous refutation of traditional delineations
and dichotomies has made him something of a (retrospective)
champion of today's convergent cutting edge in the
cognitive and social sciences. He argued more explicitly
than his predecessors or contemporaries that all perception
must be bodily cognitive action, which is necessarily
pre-reflective. He famously argued that consciousness
is "not a matter of 'I think that' but of 'I
can.'" In Sense and Non-Sense Merleau-Ponty wrote
that it is only through the body that we can perceive
the world around us and comprehend the meanings we
inherit in our social environments. He noted the telling
ambiguity in the body's presence as both "subject"
and "object" within the Western epistemological
tradition. The "body-subject," as he termed
the individual, does not simply "exist"
in the Cartesian conception of self-conscious affirmation,
but rather dwells in the world here and now. In an
address summarizing and defending his Phenomenology
of Perception shortly after its publication, Merleau-Ponty
noted that, "the perceived world is the always
presupposed foundation of all rationality, all value
and all existence." He went on to point out that,
although "there is a whole cultural world which
constitutes a second level about perceptual experience,"
perception is nonetheless "the fundamental basis
which cannot be ignored." In traditional Platonic,
Augustinian and Cartesian thought, of course, such
perception had not only been ignored but it had been
systematically and relentlessly denigrated for two
millennia. In Western thought after Merleau-Ponty,
however, the human body becomes a pivotal, metaphorical
nexus for renewed epistemological and ontological
possibility.
____And
in Merleau-Ponty's aesthetics, we have at last a system
of thought we can build on in articulating this study's
proposed theory and method. Merleau-Ponty joined with
Heidegger, Sartre and other existentialist thinkers
in decrying the increasingly conspicuous limitations
which operational thinking had placed on the West's
epistemological explorations and ontological potentialities-particularly
in art and technology's role in enabling the ontogenesis
of value and meaning. In Phenomenology of Perception,
Merleau-Ponty outlined his phenomenology of art and
found in the artist Paul Cézanne's painting
in particular an aesthetic enactment of his own efforts
to articulate a philosophical way between empiricism
and rationalism, subjectivism and objectivism. He
wrote that the philosopher and the artist share the
same problem, namely "expressing what exists."
He quoted Novotny's analysis of Cézanne's art
as the attempt to paint the "pre-world,"
the physiognomy of things in their sensible configuration
as they effortlessly arise from nature. In his essay
"Cézanne's Doubt," Merleau-Ponty
stresses that the artist does not "imitate"
nature as in the ancient notion of mimesis, nor is
artistic creation an act of cognitive "imagination"
projecting an inner world outward. Rather, what we
discover through art is a fusion of self and nature
in which the world is re-constructed. This is enaction
and the essence of eco-cognitive technology. In one
of the most insightful passages in "Cézanne's
Doubt," pertaining to this self-world fusion
in artistic creation, Merleau-Ponty quotes Cézanne
as saying, "The landscape thinks itself in me,
and I am its consciousness." This is art's promise-and
the essence of the perpetual innovation of value and
meaning in the co-creation of humanity and its world
through the paradox of technology.
____Having
come all this long way toward a convergence of Eastern
and Western theories of meaning, toward a sound theoretical
framework for an integral, aesthetic methodology,
we must revisit our contemporary foils to such an
embodied epistemology and method. For in Fukuyama
and Baudrillard we find ourselves once again at the
doggedly divergent positions at either end of subject-object
polarities and of today's political-economic spectrum.
A brief look at the defining characteristics and teleological
biases of their influential and representative thought
will prove instructive in our discussion of the 'radical
middle path' between these absolutist and nihilistic
poles, respectively.
____As
previously described, Fukuyama offers a picture of
bourgeois rationality wherein capitalism enabled through
democracy provides the total means by which all individuals
may fulfill what he identifies as that which defines
us as human. That is, thymos, or the irrepressible
need for public recognition of the heroic, superior
self. As we have seen, Fukuyama's invocation of thymos
as that crucial, core characteristic of human nature
is the a priori foundation upon which the entirety
of his argument precariously rests. Market capitalism,
enabled by a supportive ideological infrastructure
of liberal democracy provides the final, perfected
means of channeling the human subject's ego-drive
toward economically productive ends. Fukuyama's persistent
concern is only that the status-leveling effects of
democratic institutions will inevitably drain this
vital life-force from the human soul and irretrievably
diminish humankind's drive for individual and species
supremacy, or, as he puts it, the impulse "to
be recognized not just as equal, but as superior to
others" (1992, p. xii).
____What is certainly
most striking about such a position in the present
context is the degree to which Fukuyama's vision of
human nature clings with such desperation to an ancient
notion of the human self articulated through a Greek
theory of meaning we now know to be dangerously faulted.
Varela, Thompson and Rosch describe this view as bound
by one of the most elemental linguistic technologies:
We
believe that the view of the self as an economic man,
which is the view the social sciences hold, is quite
consonant with the unexamined view of our own motivation
that we hold as ordinary, nonmindful people. Let us
state that view clearly. The self is seen as a territory
with boundaries. The goal of the self is to bring
inside the boundaries all the good things while paying
out as few goods as possible and conversely to remove
to the outside of the boundaries all of the bad things
while letting in as little bad as possible. Since
goods are scarce, each autonomous self is in competition
with other selves to get them (246).
____This
definition of the human self, rooted in the cognitive
error of the subject-object split, seeks its final
ground in what Lakoff's research identifies as the
primary container metaphor. And Fukuyama seeks a simple
affirmation for what he presents as an absolute, immutable
'truth' in an ancient Greek conception of thymos.
It would be difficult to imagine a conception of humanity
more at odds with all that we have seen thus far about
Eastern thought, enactive cognitive science, as well
as evolving conceptions of value and meaning in a
perpetual innovation Affect Economy. We do not have
the luxury of falling back onto such facile solutions.
Fukuyama's marking of "the end of history"
and his premature nostalgia for that "last man"
within whom thymos yet lives and breathes has been
met with all the well-reasoned counter-charges one
might expect of the author's celebration of American
conservatism and free market rhetoric.
____Yet,
again as we have seen, Baudrillard, Foucault and other
prominent postmodernists ostensibly giving voice to
more progressive views from the left have, albeit
for rather different reasons, similarly concluded
that we are at the end of the road for the political
economy and the dialectical reason which has carried
us safely to this towering precipice. Baudrillard,
drunk on the rarified atmosphere of his labyrinthine,
linguistic landscapes, sees the signs everywhere and
all too clearly-untethered as they are from their
earthly referents in his vertiginous, syntactic virtuality.
In Baudrillard's prose, the center cannot hold in
this maelstrom of unbounded signification, expanding
and contracting between its dyadic polarities, doubling
back again, folding in upon itself in a virtual, linguistic
reverie. This is the quality to which Butakman refers
when he confers upon Baudrillard a "privileged
niche" among the postmodern philosophers, producing
"a particular language that shares everything
with the hypertechnologized language of the science
fictional paraspace" (1997, 17). For Baudrillard
clearly inhabits the simulacrum of his own language,
imbuing his words with his unique brand of synaesthetic
dissonance. And yet, like all creatures inhabiting
flattened dialectical space, this postmodernist is
both enabled and ineluctably constrained by the very
instrument he wields to carry his meaning, which is,
as Butakman notes, his unique brand of rhetoric. In
Baudrillard's vernacular, we have collectively responded
to the "uncertainty and randomness" of our
digital, postmodern era with a redoubling of causality
and teleology in this moment of "hypertelic growth."
The inertial cancer of this age procreates "beyond
its own ends," beyond any semblance of meaning.
Here beauty becomes mere fashion, sex seeks obscenity,
and the commodity-object is absolute in "the
ecstatic amplification of just about everything."
And, if this hyperrealized, hypertelic chaos were
not enough, Baudrillard further invokes Canetti's
"tormenting thought." Beyond a given point
in history, we may no longer extricate ourselves from
this infernal implosion of meaning. This is the "dead
point" beyond which we are forever collectively
lost in ecstatic "noncontradiction." In
this nightmare, we do not know where this point may
be, where we might have passed it by. Further, if
the assurances of linear time have come to an end,
no miracle can save us from our own fatal theories
and strategies. This is the language of nihilism,
the despair of-having lost hope in an absolute ground-we
are thrown into a dizzying hell of chaos and confusion.
____But
what if, as we have argued throughout this study,
we were to find in that place beyond linear time that
we no longer require contradictions and dualisms to
drive history (which would have come to an end anyway!)?
What if we were to find that the "dead point"
was not to be feared after all? That this point is
the very center and the quiet eye of that dyadic storm?
That the "neutral point" is not the negation
of the Word and symbolic law, but is rather a "thunderous
silence" of origin and the seat of renewed meaning?
Suzuki suggests that this "Silence resembles
the eye of a hurricane; it is the center of the raging
storm and without it no motion is possible."
Eye and hurricane conjointly constitute the whole.
And yet, as Suzuki observes, "Dualists generally
miss the whole in its coherent concrete totality."
And so the dualist's final crisis becomes our final
opportunity.
____Baudrillard
argues that "the drive to spectacle is more powerful
than the instinct of preservation, and it is on the
former that we must rely." Replace the word 'spectacle'
with 'beauty' and we seem to have a redoubling of
Keats' famous stanza equating truth and beauty. And
thus what if it is not so much spectacle we crave,
but a renewed, complete and intregal beauty? Then
perhaps there is hope that this insatiable human appetite
for authentic beauty, a more whole aesthetic, will
allow us to embrace with our theories both the raging
storm as well as the silent point at its center. I
wish to believe that this is where Baudrillard seeks
to go with his repeated questions, his apparent yearning
"to pass on the side of the object" and
"return things to their enigmatic ground zero."
After all, as Baudrillard himself suggests, "God
knows where the unleashing of meaning will lead when
it refuses to produce itself as [mere] appearance."
____Baudrillard
thus joins Fukuyama in announcing humankind's teleological
arrival-the only difference being one of ontological
perspective. Where we have the capitalist's hypostasized,
free-market rapture, we would also seem to have the
postmodernist's vision of a species paralyzed and
prostrate before its commodity-object which, like
a teleological horizon event, sucks all light, meaning
and value into its infinite mass. But in arriving
at and adhering to their respective political-economic
and teleological extremes, both reveal that absolutism
and nihilism go hand in hand. On the Right we see
the glorification and absolute validation of that
human construct which is free market capitalism. In
the same breath, however, we are told that this moment
marks the beginning of the end of human nature as
we know it. Thymos, and all that has made man glorious
and great, cannot breathe in such a climate of ontological
homogeny. From the Left, we are told that, in truth,
the victory of accelerated commercialism and hypertelic
economic growth has imprisoned the human species within
this paraspatial purgatory. But there is perhaps some
hope in Baudrillard's nihilism after all, if we are
willing to take the next necessary step. This will
mean nothing less than stepping beyond these dualisms,
and finally turning to developing theory and method
which embraces epistemic groundlessness and prescribes
work from our own local, situation-grounded premises.
This is the project of the second part of this study.
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