And, as ever, the only reason I've not been posting anything is I've not been bothered to write anything.
But have a couple of things anyway:
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I'm toying with perhaps writing something trying to draw a parallel between the notion of Oedipus/Capital in Anti-Oedipus and the totalising tendency of Gestell in Heidegger's later writing. Can't promise that anything will happen with this any time soon, but a very, very rough outline would be something like:
For Deleuze & Guattari, Oedipus/Capital inflicts its codes onto the flows of productive desire, delimiting the range of productive desire within narrow limits (libidinal desire is coded through the frameworks of marriage, family, gender binary, heteronormativity etc.).
For Heidegger, Gestell is a particularly insidious form of revealing as in its purest form it masks its characters a form of revealing, presenting itself not as a perspective among others, but as the single, correct viewpoint upon the world. And this viewpoint is one where the world is only permitted to reveal itself to us as a calculable totality of resources ready for plundering.
(I'm not) Sorry for the gratuitous use of jargon there.
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A friend managed to convince me join him at a local Effective Altruists meeting. The people there where exactly what I was expecting. Fiercely determined to do good, brilliantly intelligent, utterly, utterly caught up in their own way of thinking. It'd be unfair to say they were blinkered, and I had very good conversations with them, but in a memorable episode, one person outlined the epistemology he held, which was similar to the point of being identical with the phenomenological method of Husserl.
I pointed out this parallel, and was surprised that he'd not heard of Husserl. He informed me that he didn't bother with continental thinkers, as he saw nothing of value in them.
Now I've said and thought the same about the Anglo-American tradition, so I'm in no position to criticise. But, it has made me wonder about this whole 'Analytic/Continental divide' business. I recall something I read in a book by Iris Murdoch once, that many of the ideas one finds in deconstruction were arguably hit upon and presented with greater clarity by Wittgenstein.
I'm not familiar enough with either Wittgenstein or deconstruction to pass judgement on this, but my intuition agrees with Murdoch.
Anyway, I'll try and post something that doesn't suck soon.
Regarding the Heideggerian Gestell, would you agree that what is fascinating to contemplate is how modern man got the idea that the universe is not-alive - and that there is a division between the living (biological) and non-living (chemical and physical) universe; and a further division between the conscious (human) and non-conscious (everything else) world. Reality is made into grossly simplified models that exclude the role of humans, including the role of human thinking.
ReplyDeleteThen having creating this grossly simplified model - which we know for certain to be radically incomplete, hence untrue - we come to think of the model as necessarily true - despite that we know for certain it is not!
The sum total of 'evidence' for the truth of our simple and false model is that it is apparently useful, as a rule of thumb, in some situations, when dealing with the world - predicting and manipulating things (but only approximately)!
I think this is precisely what Heidegger means when he talks about the interplay of concealing and unconcealing, that when the world shows itself (or is permitted to show itself) in a particular way, it necessarily covers over other ways it might be showing itself. Which is, of course, an oversimplification of the concept.
DeleteWith Gestell specifically, one might argue that the danger lies precisely in how obvious its success and power is, in how dramatically it has transformed the world and our relationship with it. Such extreme usefulness distracts us from the truth that Gestell is but one way of revealing, a very useful one of course, but not the only way of thinking about the world.
It's not so much that Wittgensteein said it better, for what cannot be said must be passed over, but that he showed through the transcendentalism of his ladderianist mysticism an a priori almost Taoist pre-positionalism that situates the roar of a lion, to interpenetrate the notebooks osmotically with the Tractatus, that must forever avoid such uber-positioning of post Kantian hubritic grandeur as regards the possibility of the in itself as a communicable meta-narrative of speciest privilege. Obviously.
ReplyDeleteI see what you did there.
DeleteSorry - couldn't resist it!
DeleteOnce again, it comes up:
ReplyDelete1-outta-1 croaks, brudda...
yet, that aint TheEnd.
We shall be Divinely Judged
on how worthy our existence was;
then, we're sent to either side,
the L which is going down...
or the R which is going Up.
Where shall YOUR indelible soul reside?
This lifelong demise is but a test.
God bless your eternal spirit.
Once again, it comes up:
ReplyDelete1-outta-1 croaks, brudda...
yet, that aint TheEnd.
We shall be Divinely Judged
on how worthy our existence was;
then, we're sent to either side,
the L which is going down...
or the R which is going Up.
Where shall YOUR indelible soul reside?
This lifelong demise is but a test.
God bless your eternal spirit.