In rereading A Thousand Plateaus, I am mostly struck by the enormous accumulation of statements declaring that X “is” something, by its composition as a litany of assertions. This accrual of claims fascinates, but on what theory of Being does it depend…on what logic? What notion of meaning-knowing emerges from it rhetorically to drive it forward?
Tag Archives: philosophy
I asked jokingly, “if Heidegger can say that the human being is not the lord of beings, but the shepherd of Being, then is all thinking milking and shearing?” But then, in fact, what do we ever do, in thought, as thinkers, but knead and extract? Any effort at knowing scrapes off the surface of Being, to card and to spin, to knit a garment that warms us from unknowing cold. And any conclusion we draw, an attempt to curdle, so that we have something to hold on to, a way to handle and store the ungraspable of our raw experience.
Then, finally, the ethical, because I speak on the side of shepherds who have no need to kill or eat from their flocks, no desire to kill or devour as I make my way; at depth, our responsibility is to care for Being, not to harvest it.
Understanding is merely the instrumentalization of knowing-being. Any active attempt to understand must be circumvented by prior knowledge, as such, lest it seek validation in the comprehension of things through the covering of beings’ being.
Resisting “life,” resisting “story”
I often find myself resisting the void of a concept such as one’s “life,” the normative narrativity of viewing a “life” as sequence of events with story-like structure, and story-like meaning. Generally, I don’t like imposing that artificial logic on whatever it is I am wherever and whenever I happen to be. I prefer to let moments be moments, without the whole associated apparatus.
Galen Strawson’s “Against Narrativity” really helps crystallize this episodic, non-narrative mode, a mode of being-around-the-world without being-about-the-world.
I take it that many people are naturally Diachronic, and that many who are Diachronic are also Narrative in their outlook on life. If one is Episodic, by contrast, one does not figure oneself, considered as a self, as something that was there in the (further) past and will be there in the (further) future.
One has little or no sense that the self that one is was there in the (further) past and will be there in the future, although one is perfectly well aware that one has long-term continuity considered as a whole human being. Episodics are likely to have no particular tendency to see their life in Narrative terms.
I have a past, like any human being, and I know perfectly well that I have a past. I have a respectable amount of factual knowledge about it, and I also remember some of my past experiences ‘from the inside’, as philosophers say. And yet I have absolutely no sense of my life as a narrative with form, or indeed as a narrative without form. Absolutely none. Nor do I have any great or special interest in my past. Nor do I have a great deal of concern for my future.
I’m well aware that my past is mine in so far as I am a human being, and I fully accept that there’s a sense in which it has special relevance to me* now, including special emotional and moral relevance. At the same time I have no sense that I* was there in the past, and think it obvious that I* was not there, as a matter of metaphysical fact. As for my practical concern for my future, which I believe to be within the normal human range (low end), it is biologically – viscerally – grounded and autonomous in such a way that I can experience it as something immediately felt even though I have no significant sense that I* will be there in the future.
People can develop and deepen in valuable ways without any sort of explicit, specifically Narrative reflection, just as musicians can improve by practice sessions without recalling those sessions. The business of living well is, for many, a completely non-Narrative project. Granted that certain sorts of self-understanding are necessary for a good human life, they need involve nothing more than form-finding, which can exist in the absence of Narrativity; and they may be osmotic, systemic, not staged in consciousness.
As for Narrativity, it is in the sphere of ethics more of an affliction or a bad habit than a prerequisite of a good life. It risks a strange commodification of life and time – of soul, understood in a strictly secular sense. It misses the point. ‘We live’, as the great short story writer V. S. Pritchett observes, ‘beyond any tale that we happen to enact.’
Galen Strawson, “Against Narrativity”
Jonathon Keats
Keats made his debut in 2000 at Refusalon in San Francisco, where he sat in a chair and thought for 24 hours, with a female model posing nude in the gallery. His thoughts were sold to patrons as art, at a price determined by dividing their annual income down to the minute.
In 2002 Keats held a petition drive to pass the Law of Identity, A ≡ A, a law of logic, as statutory law in Berkeley, California. Specifically, the proposed law stated that, “every entity shall be identical to itself.” Any entity caught being unidentical to itself was to be subject to a fine of up to one tenth of a cent.
Keats copyrighted his mind in 2003, claiming that it was a sculpture that he’d created, neural network by neural network, through the act of thinking. The reason, he told the BBC World Service when interviewed about the project, was to attain temporary immortality, on the grounds that the Copyright Act would give him intellectual property rights on his mind for a period of seventy years after his death. He reasoned that, if he licensed out those rights, he would fulfill the Cogito ergo sum (“I think, therefore I am”), paradoxically surviving himself by seven decades. In order to fund the posthumous marketing of intellectual property rights to his mind, he sold futures contracts on his brain in an IPO at Modernism Gallery in San Francisco.