Wow. Wowowowowowowow. I got my mind abso-freaking-lutely blown today. By book-larnin', no less! One of my classes is (broadly) about the representation of Enlightenment ideals in contemporary literature. For next week's class, we are supposed to read Robinson Crusoe (snore)...but ALSO Horkheimer and Adorno's COMPLETE AND TOTAL REPUDIATION of those Enlightenment ideals, in their "Concept of Enlightenment." Apparently they wrote this in the midst of German fascism, so they're not exactly disinterested. BUT THAT'S COMPLETELY THE POINT, ENLIGHTENMENT THINKERS.
Ahem. I'll stop shouting.
I can't sum up just how amazingly productive this reading was for me, or how frustrating. But let me just say that I may have finally broken through my fear of theory (feory?), as well as come to a better understanding of the argument that destruction is a form of creation. This is HUGE for anarchist theory, and the part of linguistic theory that most terrified me. The idea is that once you begin to understand something, to know it, you've already begun UNknowing it, because you've filtered the essence of the thing through your interpretation (specifically using names and language), thus changing it. So once you understand that green thing outside your window as a tree, it's not a "tree" anymore. From my natural viewpoint, this leads inexorably to nihilism and death.
But you can also consider that in this inevitable unknowability of the thing is the possibility that it can be anything, so that your creative options are limitless, especially within a world in which nothing can be definitively known.
There's also Horkheimer and Adorno's discussion that the first and most important tenet of the Enlightenment was the admonishment to know yourself, so that you are destroyed as soon as you become self-aware. Terrifying, right? But there's always the option to un-know yourself, if only you can break free from a society that has drunk the Kool-Aid saying that the unknown is terrifying, instead of empowering...the (insidious) legacy of the Enlightenment.
And that same legacy that keeps you from considering the creative possibilities that exist because you don't know them yet, also keeps society enslaved. So in a larger sense, our human need to know, in order to quell the fear that not knowing means not existing, has enslaved us to the very things that we purport to control through knowledge. And so if you take steps to destroy what you know--*cough*government*cough*--the creative possibilities are endless. THIS is a system that rewards experimentation, instead of enforcing stagnation, because it permits and EXPECTS that the second something is created, it begins to be undone.
Guuuggggggggggg. That was the sound of my brain liquefying and running out of my nose onto the paper and forming a heart.
Also crashed a lecture in the law school about "Compassion and Public Reason." Fruitful, for discussion of political versus social spheres, the juxtaposition (or incapatibility) of freedom and necessity, the idea of compassion as a collapsing of rational space and, most especially, the idea that those with freedom can speak for those with unfulfilled necessities (but that maybe they shouldn't).
If you've made it this far in the post, thanks for putting up with me. I know that I am the only one who finds these types of entries interesting, and part of me feels bad for posting them...but it's also my goddamned blog and I'll write what I want. Humph. But I promise, more widely interesting entries to come.
And, because you've made it to the end...enjoy.
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