From: "Mary&Eric Murphy&Salstrand" <ericandmary-AT-earthlink.net> Subject: Against the Grain Date: Thu, 28 Mar 2002 19:3:8 -0600 Against the grain Even though it remains true, as Hugh and Richard point out, the act of totalizing has political implications, I agree with Judy that this appears to be merely a specific instance of a much more general rule. Totalization remains imbedded in the very structure of language itself. If I say the word "tree" I am immediately confronted with a universal entity of almost Platonic dimensions. As Lyotard puts it in "The Differend", "there exists no protocol for establishing the reality of the universe, because the universe is the object of an idea." >From my own antiquarian, pre-structuralist perspective, I tend to see this problem of totalizing rhetoric as embedded in the very notion of the Enlightenment itself. Certainly for Kant, the purpose of critique was to question the transcendental illusion of metaphysics by stating lucidly the limits of reason. Since that time there have been opposing armed camps confronting one another across the Western front. There are the Hegelians of various stripes who invoke the Absolute just as there are traditionalists who invoke God. All of these remain monotonous monotheists of varying stripes. Against them remain the guerilla forces of diverse anti-totalizing polytheists whose vagrant thoughts must sometimes brush against the grain of language. I have followed with some interest the renewed discussion here of the topic of the cyborg. I want to restate an observation I previously made. If the cyborg signifies the interface between animal and machine as most definitions demand then humans have always been cybrogs because language is the original prosthetic. So-called human culture represents the first stirrings of virtual reality. Plato's parable of the cave as a first draft of the Matrix. The interesting contemporary question regarding the cyborg is why there has been this historical transition from totalization (with its obvious survival value) to something else. Why is this occurring in the most Darwinian sense of the word. In a banal sense it would appear the grafted technologies of reason and language are currently allowing us to undergo a kind of species differentiation in a way that resembles the diversity of color pigmentation in a butterflies wings - the myriad specific adaptations to multifariously diverse environments. In poetic terms it even echoes William Carlos Williams famous dictum - "no ideas except in things." At the same time, however, this development is modified by an alien awareness that the immediate is not the totality - what I would name, echoing Diogenes, the cosmopolitan. The difference between totalization and the cosmopolitan lies in the difference between the gestalt plane of uniformity occupied by the former and the ironic sense of epistemological bilocation enjoyed by the latter. It is this felt sense of being both here and elsewhere that marks the cosmopolitan, a paradoxical sense of occupying heterogeneous realms simultaneously, the strange loop of awareness bending back upon itself. If this situation seem familiar it is because it mirrors the conflict which Kant and Lyotard both named the sublime. It differs from totalization to the same extent that feelings differ from knowledge. Wittgenstein once described the experience of life as being that of a limited whole. Such an experience can only be felt. It cannot be known. >From the point of view of logic, the experience remains one of austere nonsense. To paraphrase Pascal - the heart has its hallucinations of which the hallucinations of reason know nothing. The cyborg is a monkey with a dream machine that calibrates itself to the vast encounters of alien worlds. A bastard child of instrumental reason, lost in space and forgetful of itself in the aporias of Paradise. eric
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