Rationality and Totality, Part I

If we equate rationality and totality, then our brief theory of the Enlightenment becomes, “Enlightenment is the overcoming of rationality through critique,” and that won’t do at all. But does rationality involve (and I wish I had a more accurate verb than “involve” to indicate a relationship between the two concepts—I require a technical vocabulary here which I do not have,) totality, and if so, how? If rationality “involves” totality, and we do wish to overcome totality, is there any way to remove totality and still have something salvageable of rationality?

I’m attempting to sidestep the whole issue of what totality and rationality are—and I doubt, even though I give myself all freedom and license, I will yet be able to let myself get away with that. Carl had once indicated that what he meant by totality was “the total and complete picture of the real,” and I had at once noted that he had thereby used the term he wished to define as part of its own definition…Thank God we all know what we mean when we mean it…Even if no one else does!

I have some guilty conscience about the use of “completeness” as part of a working definition of totality, too. We have at our disposal some of the greatest intellectual accomplishments of the 20th Century—the completeness theorems of mathematical logic—which we could bring to bear upon what totality means, how it might work…I’m of a divided mind about our neglect of these if we imagine we really are serious about “overcoming totality.” On the one hand, don’t these theorems indicate that in certain ways “totality” is already overcome? And on the other hand, I suspect that whatever our concerns and fears about totality really come to, if they come to anything, they remain untouched by the insights which might be garnered from these theorems. I hope, though, we will examine this latter thought with more diligence at some point.

I have felt frustrated trying to put myself into an empathic relationship with the thinkers of the historical Enlightenment in order to think what they meant by rationality. When we are talking about Kant and his ideas, I find it hard to remember he worked before Darwin, before Freud,before Goedel, before Quantum Mechanics. I find it hard to remember-- and to take into account. Is it possible we would ever really find Kant valuable as if he were our contemporary rather than, because of his historical placement—naïve—of interest to us as a step in the history of ideas rather than for valid ideas? I also struggle because of Kant’s relationship to the cutting edge of science as he found it—in other words, of Kant’s relationship to Newton. Kant reacts to Newton. That Kant reacts to Newton seems to me to be part of what’s wrong – this reaction defines philosophy as reaction. A little ray of light in philosophy today (oops! An Enlightenment metaphor!) are those (I refer to Deleuze and Guattari,) who show for the first time how to philosophize by using Newton productively.

Myth Is Religion, Ideology, And - False

What Deleuze is creating in this quote (thanks for the reference, Yusef) is a definition of blogging which he, sadly, didn’t live to experience. He would have been appreciative of the rhizomatic nature of blogs.

“The new archivist proclaims that henceforth he will deal only with statements. He will not concern himself with what previous archivists have treated in a thousand different ways: propositions and phrases. He will ignore both the vertical hierarchy of propositions which are stacked on top of one another, and the horizontal relationship established between phrases in which each seems to respond to another. Instead he will remain mobile, skimming along in a kind of diagonal line that allows him to read what could not be apprehended before, namely statements. […] Such multiplicities have no set linguistic construction, yet they are statements.

The copulative statement: myth is totality is just that: a vain attempt to remain immobile. Nothing is immobile. Everything is becoming.

Now THAT is totalitarian, too. But within the prison of linguistics we are locked in binary thinking and simile.

What we should be engaged in is concept creation – an escape from prison.

The concept is (therefore) both absolute and relative: it is relative to its own components, to other concepts, to the plane on which it is defined, and to the problems it is supposed to resolve, but it is absolute through the condensation it carries out, the site it occupies on the plane, and the conditions it assigns to the problem. As whole it is absolute, but insofar as it is fragmentary it is relative. (D&G: What Is Philosophy?, p. 21)

This is Chaosmos like the drop into water. There can be no fixed trajectory, no anticipation fulfilled, no wish granted, but still a statement made.

Coming back to a previous quote from you, Yusef:

As Jean-Francois Lyotard said, “Postmodernism should wage a war on totality.”

Of course.

Apart from the bellicose (and moralistic) semantics here, Lyotard is right. And we will – hopefully – never return to totalitarianism.

A drop, or a tear, into the water creates rings of desire. Just as a thought or an idea builds a fragment of a whole that refuses to be absolute.

Let’s move beyond the vertical and delve into the horizontal: there is NO underground, only an ever building rhizome, no up, no down, no gravity. Only statements.

This has just been one.

Maybe it still is.

Copulation forever.

“Myth is Totality” as Desire, Part V

As an engendering venture of the Enlightenment Underground, Carl greeted us with this admirable, identificative copulative: myth is totality.

“Myth is totality” is a metaphoric configuration suggesting one idea, totality, may be used in place of the other, myth, positing a likeness or analogy between them—a similitude.

As such “myth is totality” is useless to us as we grope our way towards—not an understanding of the Enlightenment—I don’t think we are interested in a scholarly or historical understanding of this important era— but towards a creation which we can conceptualize only by accentuating and agitating our difference from the historical Enlightenment.

Instead of instantiating difference, “myth is totality” may token a process of homogenization—a destroying of distinction.

Instead of allowing for rhizomatic burrowing, the Underground of this Enlightenment collapses on the miners working the “myth is totality” vein—the rough timbers of the Underground tunnel which had “myth is totality” above its lintel gives out under the burden of an enormous load--the underground becomes ground into the ground –-a stifling blackness overcomes the last carbide light-- the cows become black, the cats become gray--

"I never thought that I would find myself
In bed amongst the stones
The columns are all men
Begging to crush me
No shapes sail on the dark deep lakes
And no flags wave me home

In the caves
All cats are grey
In the caves
The textures coat my skin
In the death cell
A single note
Rings on and on and on"-R Smith

...gray moles, black rats, gray-black worms—all are dead and gray...

But enough of all that—enough!!

“Myth is totality” will work well for us, I think, if we discard the metaphoric configuration and use “myth” and “totality” (and “overcoming” and “critique”,) to form a pragmatic of multiplicities – to name statements, with the word statement to be used in precisely this way,

“The new archivist proclaims that henceforth he will deal only with statements. He will not concern himself with what previous archivists have treated in a thousand different ways: propositions and phrases. He will ignore both the vertical hierarchy of propositions which are stacked on top of one another, and the horizontal relationship established between phrases in which each seems to respond to another. Instead he will remain mobile, skimming along in a kind of diagonal line that allows him to read what could not be apprehended before, namely statements. […] Such multiplicities have no set linguistic construction, yet they are statements. […] Statements […] inhabit a general realm of rarity within which they are distributed begrudgingly and even inadequately. No sense of possibility or potentiality exists in the realm of statements. Everything in them is real and all reality is manifestly present. All that counts is what has been formulated at a given moment, including blanks and gaps. It is none the less certain that statements can be opposed to one another, and placed in hierarchical order. Foucault rigorously demonstrates that contradictions between statements can be measured only by calculating the concrete distance between them within this space of rarity. Comparisons between statements are therefore linked to a mobile diagonal line that allows us, within this space, to make a direct study of the same set at different levels, as well as to choose some sets on the same level while disregarding others (which in their turn might presuppose another diagonal line). It is precisely the rarefied nature of this space which creates these unusual movements and bursts of passion that cut space up into new dimensions. To our amazement, this ‘incomplete, fragmented form’ shows, when it comes to statements, how not only few things are said, but ‘few things can be said.’ What consequences from this transportation of logic will find their way into that element of rarity or dispersion which has nothing to do with negativity, but which on the contrary forms that ‘positivity’ which is unique to statements?” – from Foucault, by Gilles Deleuze, pages 1-3, “The New Archivist.”

“Myth is Totality” as Desire, Part IV

As an inaugurating gesture of the Enlightenment Underground, Carl confronted us with a bold, idenficatory copulative: “myth is totality.”

Myth is linked to totality: myth becomes a version of totality and totality becomes a version of myth. The copulative makes an assimilation of two very different phenomena —they become equated. Does the equating within “myth is totality” represent the creation of a concept or, on the other hand, a collapse of distinction—a leveling of difference, a blurring, a “making the same”?

Is the desire of concept creation the same as the desire for creating similarities, of making the same? (Similarities must be both created and desired.) Is the desire of the historical Enlightenment characterized by one or the other of these? To what extent does our confusion of two very different desires, if such they be, prevent us from seeing what happened in the historical Enlightenment and thus fail in making Enlightenment happen now?

We could test the veracity of “Enlightenment is the overcoming of totality through critique” by trying to determine whether the objective of the historical Enlightenment was to overcome totality.

Did the thinkers of the historical Enlightenment (Hobbes, Locke, Voltaire, Hume, Kant) conceive of totality as something which required overcoming? Surely not. Though they would not have described what they were doing in this way, these thinkers were attempting to shore up or build totalizations, not tear them down.

If the thinkers of the historical Enlightenment were not the ones who rejected totalization, which ones do? The thinkers of postmodernity. As Jean-Francois Lyotard said, “Postmodernism should wage a war on totality.”

By seeing Enlightenment in terms of an overcoming of totality, Carl saw Enlightenment as a form of postmodernism. “Myth is totality” as an element of Enlightenment overcoming identifies the Enlightenment project as the postmodern project,as if Enlightenment were postmodern in intent.

If we say “Enlightenment is the overcoming of totality through critique,” we’re postmodernists with Enlightenment pretensions. Why the Enlightenment pretensions? Why would we want them? Why would we disguise ourselves with Enlightenment masks? Is it not because we want to share in the prestige of Enlightenment rigor, precision, and effectiveness, and escape the sharply contrasting disrepute and notoriety of postmodernist thought and thinkers)?

If that’s what we want—to be associated with Enlightenment prestige—but to carry on with what is really a postmodern way of working and thinking—I find this a desire I will not affirm.

“Myth is Totality” as Desire, Part III

I want to aggravate and transmute Carl’s theory of the Enlightenment, “Enlightenment is the overcoming of myth through critique,” into a form which is more general than Carl's, but somehow implicit in his,

“Enlightenment is the overcoming of bad nastiness (the bad) through good wonderfulness (the good.)”

This is a far more atrocious formulation of the theory than the one I came up with before, “Enlightenment is the smuglumpkikohk of pebersmacknik through spmikregoog,” which is mere nonsense and as such is limited in its pathological consequences.

“Enlightenment is the overcoming of bad nastiness (the bad) through good wonderfulness (the good,)” has nearly unlimited pathological consequences for all who have swallowed it or something like it, and I believe we have all swallowed it or diluted forms of it – unfortunately, Carl’s originally-stated theory is a diluted form.

“Enlightenment is the overcoming of myth through critique,” was intended as a general framework for explaining the historical Enlightenment (1648-1789), the tensions and difficulties that animate the work of the great Enlightenment thinkers (especially Spinoza, Hume, and Kant,) the appeal of the Counter-Enlightenment, and the temptations of fascism.

“Enlightenment is the overcoming of bad through the good,” is an even more general framework for explaining the historical Enlightenment, with the advantage that it helps to open up features of the historical Enlightenment which Carl’s more narrow version precludes us from considering. Whatever the immense positive contributions of the historical Enlightenment (if such they be,) the historical Enlightenment, which in many ways was a reaction against religion and clergy, also contributed to strengthening authoritarian social forms exceeding in harmfulness what religion and clergy had already accomplished. Interestingly, Carl’s narrow and innocent version makes the nature of these further encroachments difficult to conceptualize.

In Carl’s theory, we must assume myth to be bad (whether myth is understood as totality, error,religious thinking, murkiness, or whatever,) and we must assume critique to be good (whatever critique may be); we must assume the Enlightenment and the processes of historical Enlightenment to be good; we must assume whatever gets overcome by Enlightenment to have been worthy for overcoming.

I don’t object to the use of assumptions, even a lot of assumptions, in the construction of a theory like this, but these are a particular kind of assumption—these are evaluative assumptions—and with evaluative assumptions I become wary. Is it productive to give evaluative assumptions the primacy they have here? Do these evaluative assumptions facilitate questioning and thinking, or shunt away what was worthy to be thought? By stating the theory as, “Enlightenment is the overcoming of the bad by the good,” I think it becomes obvious there is nothing more to be thought, and to make that explicit is why I think this form of the theory is worthwhile. Later I want to look at how the optical metaphors at the center of the Enlightenment’s project are a key to what keeps us from looking at what the Enlightenment wanted kept in the dark—the Enlightenment’s own evaluative assumptions.

"There Is Nothing Outside The Text "

Stanley Fish had a op-ed piece in The New York Times yesterday, Yusef, that seems relevant to us. Here are a few quotes,

It’s a great story, full of twists and turns, and now it has been told in extraordinary detail in a book to be published next month: “French Theory: How Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, & Co. Transformed the Intellectual Life of the United States” (University of Minnesota Press). The book’s author is Francois Cusset, who sets himself the tasks of explaining, first, what all the fuss was about, second, why the specter of French theory made strong men tremble, and third, why there was never really anything to worry about.

Certainly mainstream or centrist intellectuals thought there was a lot to worry about. They agreed with Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont, who complained that the ideas coming out of France amounted to a “rejection of the rationalist tradition of the Enlightenment” even to the point of regarding “science as nothing more than a ‘narration’ or a ‘myth’ or a social construction among many others.”

This is not quite right; what was involved was less the rejection of the rationalist tradition than an interrogation of its key components: an independent, free-standing, knowing subject, the “I” facing an independent, free-standing world. The problem was how to get the “I” and the world together, how to bridge the gap that separated them ever since the older picture of a universe everywhere filled with the meanings God originates and guarantees had ceased to be compelling to many.

The solution to the problem in the rationalist tradition was to extend man’s reasoning powers in order to produce finer and finer descriptions of the natural world, descriptions whose precision could be enhanced by technological innovations (telescopes, microscopes, atom smashers, computers) that were themselves extensions of man’s rational capacities. The vision was one of a steady progress with the final result to be a complete and accurate — down to the last detail — account of natural processes. Francis Bacon, often thought of as the originator of the project , believed in the early 17th century that it could be done in six generations.
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To this hope, French theory (and much thought that precedes it) says “forget about it”; not because no methodological cautions could be sufficient to the task, but because the distinctions that define the task — the “I,” the world, and the forms of description or signification that will be used to join them — are not independent of one another in a way that would make the task conceivable, never mind doable.

Instead (and this is the killer), both the “I” or the knower, and the world that is to be known, are themselves not themselves, but the unstable products of mediation, of the very discursive, linguistic forms that in the rationalist tradition are regarded as merely secondary and instrumental. The “I” or subject, rather than being the free-standing originator and master of its own thoughts and perceptions, is a space traversed and constituted — given a transitory, ever-shifting shape — by ideas, vocabularies, schemes, models, distinctions that precede it, fill it and give it (textual) being.
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Obviously the rationalist Enlightenment agenda does not survive this deconstructive analysis intact, which doesn’t mean that it must be discarded (the claim to be able to discard it from a position superior to it merely replicates it) or that it doesn’t yield results (I am writing on one of them); only that the progressive program it is thought to underwrite and implement — the program of drawing closer and closer to a truth independent of our discursive practices, a truth that, if we are slow and patient in the Baconian manner, will reveal itself and come out from behind the representational curtain — is not, according to this way of thinking, realizable.
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…what was important about French theory in America was its political implications, and one of Cusset’s main contentions — and here I completely agree with him — is that it doesn’t have any. When a deconstructive analysis interrogates an apparent unity — a poem, a manifesto, a sermon, a procedure, an agenda — and discovers, as it always will, that its surface coherence is achieved by the suppression of questions it must not ask if it is to maintain the fiction of its self-identity, the result is not the discovery of an anomaly, of a deviance from a norm that can be banished or corrected; for no structure built by man (which means no structure) could be otherwise.

More here:

http://tinyurl.com/42rwkb

The Overcoming Of Unreason. Part II

The historical Enlightenment is a concept. And we can do "the linguistic turn", go Wittgensteinian on it, and bear in mind the fallacy of representation power of language. Let's instead go historical: who was Kant writing to? In all probability he was addressing the 2 percent of the population that belonged to the nobility. But what did central Europe look like at the time in the late part of the 18th century:

The pattern of Europe's social organization, first established in the Middle Ages, continued well into the eighteenth century. Social status was still largely determined not by wealth and economic standing, but by the division into the traditional "orders" or "estates," determined by heredity and quality. This divinely sanctioned division of society into traditional orders was supported by Christian teaching, which emphasized the need to fullfil the responsibilities of one's estate. Inequality was part of that scheme and could not be eliminated.

Although Enlightenment intellectuals attacked these traditional distinctions, they did not die easily. In the Prussian law code of 1794, marriage between noble males and middle-class females was forbidden without a government dispensation. In cities, sumptuary legislation designated what dress different urban groups should wear so as to keep them separate. Even without government regulation, however, different social groups remained easily distinguished everywhere in Europe by the distinctive, traditional clothes they wore.

Since society was still mostly rural in the eighteenth century, the peasantry constituted the largest social group, making up as much as 85 percent of Europe's population. There were rather wide differences, however, between peasants from area to area. The most important distinction at least legally was between the free peasant and the serf. Peasants in Britain, northern Italy, the Low Countries, Spain, most of France, and some areas of western Germany shared freedom despite numerous regional and local differences. Legally free peasants, however, were not exempt from burdens.

The nobles, who constituted about 2 or 3 percent of the European population, played a dominating role in society. Being born a noble automatically guaranteed a place at the top of the social order, with all of its attendant special privileges and rights. The legal privileges of the nobility included judgment by their peers, immunity from severe punishment, exemption from many forms of taxation, and rights of jurisdiction. Especially in central and eastern Europe, the rights of landlords over their serfs were overwhelming.

Kant was an aristocrat, however puritan in his daily life, who was a supreme concept-maker in true Deleuzian fashion. And as such we should approach him and his concepts. He was an Utopian, a dreamer who nevertheless heralded a vision of equality and intellectuality.

He was not only privileged, but also narrow-minded.

Are we still?

“Myth is Totality,” as Desire, Part II

Carl offered what appeared to be a relatively straightforward theory of the Enlightenment,

“Enlightenment is the overcoming of myth through critique,”

which turns out to not be at all straightforward unless the theory’s constituent terms can be considered straightforward, which they cannot.

As Orla might say, “it all depends on what is meant by overcoming, myth, and critique.”

What Orla said on March 1, 2008 about an Adorno and Horkheimer quotation would surely apply (mutatis mutandis) to Carl’s theory of Enlightenment as well,

“The theory relies so heavily on the thinking of opposites and differences. The meaning of ‘myth’ depends on the meaning of ‘critique’,and as Derrida would say the process is circular. The opposites relate to themselves rather than to what it purports to describe. And in this system of differences the first is invariable loaded with negative associations."

There is no assurance the words myth,reason,overcoming,totality, or even critique can work as they would need to work to make this theory do something. My fear is that we can pour any amount of time, effort, and thinking into the meaning of Carl’s theory and come no closer to discovering what it is which entices us about the historical Enlightenment, or where our fear of the historical Enlightenment also comes,

“Enlightenment is the smuglumpkikohk of pebersmacknik through spmikregoog.”

If we use the concept of myth, reason or unreason in our theory of Enlightenment, we have to explain what we mean: we have to define these terms. Defining terms is not a difficult matter, and in the case of the term myth, Carl already made a start of it by saying myth is totality. However, what is hard is to define the terms in such a way as to avoid Orla’s above-mentioned criticism, which in part means avoiding arbitrarily defining the terms of the theory; which means to avoid defining the terms of the theory with the definitions having no relationship to reality—-having no relationship outside their own peculiar circularity.