Conceptions of Reality

Conceptions of Reality. An Introduction.

Prologue, sort of:

Some people are willing to accept whatever they have been taught.
Everything in their world seems to be clear and devoid of ambiguity.
They don't seem to be affected or troubled by inconsistencies or even
lack of logic. Other people are restless. They are forever on a quest for order, coherence, and meaning. The world seems to them in chaos and in confusion. Yet they are driven to make sense of the world. The following are notes taken in an effort to understand the world. They are taken verbatim mostly from a book which is slim but surprisingly fecund. I found it not easy to understand the book, maybe due to its conciseness, not because of the turgidity of the author's prose or the turbidity of his thoughts. I decided to copy down the words so I could follow the thoughts. Some are from Will Durant whose witty and incisive comments are almost impossible to paraphrase. Occasionally, I jump in and say something and the reader would see right away which words are mine due to my predilection for florid and repetitive expressions. All these notes are primarily for my own consumption, a crude way of educating myself. If you happen to read them, that meant I gave in to the need of sharing and interacting. I could not tolerate loneliness and selfishness anymore.

As I get older and nearer the demise of my life, I feel acutely more than ever the need to synthesize, even to pontificate. However, I am aware that there is nothing sadder and funnier than a spectacle of an old fool raving and ranting. He is losing perspective. He is becoming ossified instead of flexible and supple in his thinking. He is trying to cling to his fanciful self-conception of dignity, even reality. Few old people are willing to learn. It's not easy to teach new tricks to an old dog. Maybe I am such an old fool. Maybe I am not. Maybe I am just a crazy dog which loves to bark to get my daily fix of attention. I don't know. Too many "maybes".

"Life has meaning. To find its meaning is my meat and drink." Browning.

So much of our lives is meaningless, a self-cancelling vacillation and futility. We strive with the chaos about us and within us. But we believe that there is something significant and beautiful in us, could
we but decipher our souls. We want to understand. We want to know.
Truth may not make us rich, but it will make us free. Such is our conviction. That's why we talk and think philosophy. That's why we know we are different than most. We have intellectual and thus moral courage. We prefer light, even glaring light, to darkness, no matter how comforting and assuring and familiar darkness can be.

I am reading three books at the same time. A bad sign. Bill Clinton has the same habit. I cannot stay at one thought, ploddingly pursuing a linear thought to its conclusion. I like associations and interactions of thoughts. I like to jump around, trying to find unity in plurality, like my own idea that life, the universe itself, is the manifestation of energy in different forms/stages; like in every man, woman, and child there is a powerful need to feel that one is not worthless and that most, if not all, of the behavior of a human is the manifestation of that need, the drive for significance once the basic biological needs are met. There is a restless drive for being the best, if not better than most, in a given field. Thus, the fall from grace of Tiger Woods and his swift loss of commercial endorsements are subjects worthy of pondering. The hubris of thinking that he could cheat his wife, not with one woman, but with many--with one, he could be condoned that he did that out of "love", and not paying a price for it. Everything has a price. Every action has a reaction. Communism in Vietnam will fall. The question is when. Practices which are against reason, against moderation, against morality cannot last. Human history has shown that.

Philosophy includes five fields of study and discourse: logic, aesthetics, ethics, politics, and metaphysics. Metaphysics gets into so much controversy and bloodshed because it is not, like other forms of philosophy, an attempt to coordinate the real in the light of the ideal. Instead, it is the study of "ultimate reality" of all things: of the real and final nature of "matter" (ontology), of "mind" (philosophical psychology), and of the interrelation of "mind" and "matter" in the processses of perception and knowledge
(epistemology). Now, you perhaps wonder why a "mind" like that of Nguyen Huu Liem who has a law degree and a Master degree in philosophy, and teaches philosophy in a community college, fails to
recognize the realities of the evil of communism as practiced by the
VCP. I have written a scathing review of NHL's servile, slavish report of the "grand" conference of Viet Kieu held in Hanoi in November of 2009. People like NHL give law yers and philosophers a bad name. They are supposed to think in a logical fashion, but alas too often they let base emotions like greed and desire for fame and glory override their intellect, making a crude, cunning Philistine like Mao who knew too well the timidity and cowardice of some intellectuals to the point that he dared to make a remark that intellectuals were not worth as much as shit. Precisely the behavior of cowards and bootlickers like NHL and his ilk invited such a contempt from a son of a peasant farmer like Mao. On the other hand, we have lawyer heroes like Le Cong Dinh and Le Thi Cong Nhan who stuck their necks out in an effort to save Vietnam. In the end, one cannot learn and acquire courage and good character at school. One was born with those qualities and or instilled at an early age in proper family upbringing. So, when a person blindly worships and defends the VCP despite all the overwhelming evidence that the behavior of the VCP is evil and contrary to the interests of Vietnam, that person invites not only the cursing and contempt upon himself, but also upon his parents.


PART ONE: THE GENEALOGY OF MODERN ART

Modern art is not a confirmation of modernity but an articulation of its limits.

Avant-garde modern art which supposedly begins with Picasso's
Demoiselles d'Avigon can be seen as originating in protest and
reaction against the unlimited totalizing project of modern rationalism.

Orthodoxy is a Christian, originally Platonic, term meaning "correct belief," as opposed to heterodoxy, literally "other belief," and,
worse, "heresy." Heresy, a Greek word meaning "choice," soon took on a
negative connotation and was specialized to mean "wrong choice."

What’s Modern? The Shock of the Old

Modern comes from the Latin word modo, meaning “just now”. Since when have we been modern/ For a surprisingly long time, as the following example shows.

Around 1127, the Abbot Suger began constructing his abbey basilica of St. Denis in Paris. His architectural ideas resulted in something never seen before, a “new look” neither classically Greek nor Roman nor Romanesque.
Suger didn’t know what to call it, so he fell back on the Latin, opus modernum. A modern work. Suger helped to inaugurate an immensely influential architectural style which became known as the Gothic. Gothic was in fact a term of abusxe, coined by Italian Renaissance theorists, meaning a northern or German barbaric style. The ideal style of Renaissance architects and artists was the classical Greek, or what they called the antica e buena maniera moderna---the ancient and good modern style.

Ever since then, architects have been arguing about what represents a perennial style---classical, gothic, modern or even postmodern.

Dialectial Antagonism

At least since medieval times, there has been a motivating sense of antagonism between ‘then” and “now”, between ancient and modern. Historical periods in the West have followed one another in disaffinity with what has gone before. The result of this historical dialectic (from the Greek, debate or discourse) is that Western culture recognizes no single tradition. History is carved up into conceptual periods: medieval, Renaissance, Baroque, Romantic, and so on.

Another peculiarity of Western culture is its strongly historical bias, a belief that history determines the way things are and must be.

Karl Marx’s dialectical materialism provided the basic historicist formula. Marxism established a structural difference between society’s traditional or cultural institutions and its economic productive forces. Rapid-paced progress occurs in the infrastructutr, the economic sphere of productive activities which supports but also subverts the superstructure, the social sphere of ideology which includes religion, art, politics, law and all traditional attitudes. The superstructure evolves more slowly and is more resistant to change than the economic infrastructure.

What is Modernism?

The Marxian formula is still useful for understanding the different speed-lanes of change in the traditional and productive spheres of society.

Modernism, in the infrastructural productive sense, begins in the 1890’s and 1900’s, a time which experienced mass technological innovations, the second tidal wave of the Industrial Revolution began nearly a century before.

Modernism in the cultural or superstructural sense occupies the same period in the early 1900’s---the first phase of modernist experimentation in literature, music, the visual arts and architecture. Some art historians have argued, to an extent correctly, that the invention of photography ended the authority of painting to reproduce reality. Technological innovation in the infrastructure had outstripped the superstructural traditions of visual art. The doctrine of realism itself was coming to an end. Realism depends on a mirror theory of knowledge, essentially that the mind is a mirror of reality. Objects existing outside the mind can be represented (reproduced by a concept or work of art) in a way that is adequate, accurate, and true.

Paul Cezanne 91839-1906) did not scrap realism but revised it to include uncertainty in our perception of things. Representation had to account for the effect of interaction between seeing and the object, the variations of viewpoint and possibilities of doubt in what one sees. We don’t see things as fixed but as shifting. A tree changes if my gaze slightly shifts. Cezanne had taken a revolutionary new direction, painting not reality but the effect of perceiving it.

Cubism
Cubism, unleashed by Picasso's Demoiselles d'Avignon, was then
developed by him, Georges Braque and others between 1907 and 1914. A
typical Cubist painting, Picasso's Girl with a Mandolin (1910), takes Cezanne's theories of variability and stability to an outstanding
logical conclusion. The human figure simplified to geometry,
interacting on a par with the space around it and treated lime
architecture, might be said to be dehumanized. Cubism agreed with
modern physics in rejecting the notion of a single isolatable event---
the view contains the viewer. This is not necessarily a dehumanizing
limit but a recognition that the human is non-exceptional to reality.

"Reproducible reality" was left to photography, while art took a
quantum leap in a new Cubist tradition. Cubism rescued art from obsolescence and re-established its authority to represent reality in a way that photography could not. But photography threatened both traditional and avant-garde art in another sense not recognized until layer, in 1936, when the Marxist critic Walter Benjamin published his essay, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. He said the authority or autonomy of original works of art derived from their unreproducibility---except as fakes---which gives them a magical aura, a charismatic halo which surrounds authentic art objects because they are unique, irreplaceable
and hence priceless. Benjamin argued that this aura---this fetish of sacred uniqueness---would be eliminated by mass reproduction.

Modern is Postmodern
The modern is always historically at war with what comes immediately
before it.

Machine-Aesthetic Optimism
The paintings of Piet Mondrian (1872-1944) show clearly the radical modernist evolution of a tree from representation to minimal pure abstraction.

Mondrian, a member of the zutch De Stijl group, shared an ambition with many other artists from different but parallel schools---Cubism, the Weimar Bauhaus, Italian Futurism, Russian Constructivism, and other varieties. They all embraced what is loosely called a machine aesthetic, an optimistic belief in the role of abstraction in human life and an emphasis on machine-like, undecorated flat surfaces. Their aim was to form a universally applicable "modern style", reproducible anywhere, transcending all national cultures. The modern architecture we are most familiar with (and which is most condemned nowadays by postmodernists) grew out of these trends and was rightly named the International style. Its most notorious practitioners were Miles van der Rohe, Walter Gropius, and Le Corbusier

Cubism in Russia advanced towards Constructivism (1914-1920), the
abandonment of easel painting in favor of kinetic artvand technical
design applied to typography, architecture, and industrial production.
In the 1930's era of Stalinism, Constructivism was suppressed as un-
Marxist "formalism". The official party-line adopted a propaganda style of heroic realism, named socialist realism. Utopianism modernism which had aimed at being internationally reproducible was rejected in favor of a realism "comprehensible" to the masses and a reproducible
model for other countries aspiring to Communism.

Also in the 1930's, totalitarian Nazi Germany prohibited modern art as
decadent, non-Aryan, and sub-human. Aix of saccharine soft porn and
heroic realism became the dogma.

Totalitarian art, with its re-institution of realism, had the post-war effect of confirming modernist abstracting as the alternative style of the democratic free world and put the last nail in realism's coffin.

Hardly surprisingly, America turned to its own domestic breed of emerging abstract art for this confirmation, which it christened Abstract Expressionism in 1946. Jackson Pollack (1912-1956) stands as the archetypal hero and tragic victim of AE. JP and his fellow artists viewed their art as emotionally charged with meaning. He and quite a few number of his school fell victim to alcoholism, premature death, and suicide.

Dadaism
Surrealism, one of Pollock's sources, was the successor movement to Dadaism (1916-24). Dadaism upsets the notion that early modernist art was entirely optimistic. Born screaming out of the mouths of Hugo Ball, Tristan Tzara, and others at the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich, 1916, it raged briefly as an international wildfire. It was, and with surprising durability, remains vitally influential. Dada means nothing, a close relative of Nada, a meaningful nothing when nothing has any meaning. Dadaism arose in nihilist protest to the mechanized assembly-line slaughter of WW I---the last war ever to be fought between imperial dynasties and the first to exploit modern technology: machine guns, poison gas, tanks, and airplanes.
Dadaism was a temporary meeting-point for some of modernism's pioneering artists: Hans Arp, Max Ernst, Francis Picabia, Marcel Duchamp, and Kurt Schwitters.

Dadaism was crucially important in releasing or unleashing automatism, a junking of all traditional rules of art in favor of chance as the direct access to the unconscious. Pollock's drip action paintings closely answer to the prescription of automatism later theorized by Surrealism.

Duchamp was the first to realize that any "readymade" non-art object on its own could be displayed as "art" if dissociated from its original context, use, and meaning. His best known examples of readymade art are Bottleneck (1914) and a porcelain Urinal (1917). Duchamp's installation of the readymade had the effect of radically upgrading the power of display. Installation shifts the empowerment of the aura from the object to the place, in other words, the gallery or museum.

The Pope of Pop Art
Andy Warhol (1930-1987) turned mechanical reproduction into art by tranferring a photo image to a silkscreen which is laid on the canvas and inked from the back. The only slight "human" touch in this Andycraft is an overlay of crudely applied synthetic color.

Other artworks followed: banal replications of Campbell's soup cans
vie with images of deep-down morbidity---Marilyn Monroe after her suicide, Jackie after JFK's assassination, mug shots of hoodlums, car
accidents, the e tric chair, gangster funerals, and race riots.

Under Warhol's treatment, aesthetics turns into anaesthetics. Hard to
tell with Andy whether he's super-cool, prodigiously voyeuristic, or just simply brain dead. And the look goes back to the looker, Andy
himself, narcissistic, aristocratic, impleccably poker-faced boredom.

Duchamp complained that the works of artists like Warhol hijacked his
brand of reproducibility which was unique and not reproducible.

We've attempted to trace the "past" modern genealogy of postmodernism, but have we arrived at "present" postmodernism. For instance, is mimimalism postmodern? Carl Andre's 120 Fire-Bricks (1968) at the Tate Gallery offered a notorious example.

Minimal art eliminated all elements of expressiveness, which leaves the aesthetic process itself (or what was left of it) on the shrinking borderline of non-art. Minimalism isn't properly postmodern because it is still absorbed in modernist experimentation initiated by forerunners like Kasimir Malevich.

Conceptual art (also in the 1960's) went further and threw out the aesthetic process altogether. "Art" itself was refuted as contaminated by the elitism and crass marketing of the art world. Pierrot Manzoni (1933-63) typified the movement when he canned his own shit and sold it, labelled 100% Pure Artist's Shit.

Conceptualization still manifested itself in the 1990's with "anti-
art" scandals, such as Damien Hirst's exhibit of a dead sheep in an aquarium of formaldehyde (1994) , or sculptures in the artists' own
blood or urine.

Conceptualism is not postmodern because its use of eccentric materials
has been foreseen by Kurt Schwitters' Merz rubbish sculptures.

From the early 1900's to the 1970's, art underwent rapid modernizing changes without precedent in Western History. There have been three fundamental stages in modernism's progress, from crisis in the
representation of reality to the representation of the unpresentable,
and finally non-presentation. In terms of the Marxist formula, it would
seem that the superstructural traditions of art have shed themselves in the effort to keep up with modernity's structural advances in technology. To put it simply, art vanishes in its quest for originality.

The more experimentation successfully proceeds to diminish the aura and autonomy of art, the more aura and autonomy become the exclusive
properties of exhibitive power---the critical establishment, curators,
art-dealers and their clients.

PART TWO: THE GENEALOGY OF POSTMODERN THEORY (PMT)

Postmodern theory is a consequence of 20th preoccupation with
language. The most important thinkers of the century---Russell,
Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and others---shifted their focus of analysis
away from ideas in the mind to the language in which thinking is
expressed.

If meaning comes from language, where does language come from?
Forget the origin of language. You'll find the meaning of language in
its function as a system. PMT has its roots in one school of formal
linguistics, structuralism, chiefly founded by Ferdinand de Saussure,
a Swiss professor of linguistics.

Structuralism
Linguistics before Saussure tended to get bogged down in the search for the historical origins of language which would reveal meaning.
Saussure instead viewed the meaning of language as the function of a system. He stated we needed to separate language as a system (la langue) (synchronic) from its actual manifestations in speech or
writing ( la parole) (diachronic). The analysis involves:
---Looking for the underlying rules and conventions that enable
language to operate.
---Analyzing the social and collective dimension of language rather than individual speech.
---Studying grammar rather than usage, rules rather expressions, models rather than data.
---Finding the infrastructure of language common to all speakers on an unconscious level. This is "the deep structure" which need not refer to historical evolution. Structuralism examines the synchronic (existing now) rather than the diachronic (existing and changing over time).

Meanings and Signs
In Saussure's view, the entire set of linguistic meanings (whether past, present, or future)?is effectively generated from a very small
set of possible sounds or phonemes. A phoneme is the smallest unit in the sound system that can indicate contrasts in meaning. The word cat
has three phonemes: /c/, /a/, /t/, which differ minimally from mat,
cot, cap, etc., each generating other meanings that combined
grammatically and syntactically can produ e extended speech or
discourse, the code of language used to express personal thought.
A distinction is made between significant units (words, or monemes,
each one endowed with one "value") and distinctive units (sounds, or phonemes, part of the form but with no direct "value")

In morpheme-based morphology, a morpheme is the smallest linguistic unit that has semantic meaning. In spoken language, morphemes are composed of phonemes (the smallest linguistically distinctive units of sound), and in written language morphemes are composed of graphemes (the smallest units of written language).

The concept morpheme differs from the concept word, as many morphemes
cannot stand as words on their own. A morpheme is free if it can stand
alone, or bound if it is used exclusively alongside a free morpheme.
Its actual phonetic representation is the morph, with the different
morphs representing the same morpheme being grouped as its allomorphs.

English example:
The word "unbreakable" has three morphemes: "un-", a bound morpheme;
"break", a free morpheme; and "-able", a bound morpheme. "un-" is also a prefix, "-able" is a suffix. Both "un-" and "-able" are affixes.

The morpheme plural-s has the morph "-s", /s/, in cats (/kæts/), but "-
es", /ɨz/, in dishes (/dɪʃɨz/), and even the voiced "-s", /z/, in
dogs (/dogz/). "-s". These are allomorphs.

Note the extreme economy of human language: with only 21 distinctive units, American Spanish can produce 100,000 significant units.

Signification
Saussure proposed that within the language, the signifier (e.g., the word or acoustic image, ox) is that which carries meaning, and the signified (the concept, ox) is that to which it refers. Signifier and signified together make up a sign. Signification is the process which binds together signifier and signified to produce the sign. A sign must be understood as a relation to produce a sign. A sign must be understood as a relation which has no meaning outside the system of signification. The choice of sound is not imposed on us by meaning itself (the animal ox does not determine the sound ox---the sound is different in different languages: ox in English, bue in Italian).
The association of sound and what it represents is the outcome of collective learning (used in social practice, or what Wittgenstein calls "language games") and this is signification. Meaning is therefore the product of a system of representation which is itself
meaningless.

Binary model
Saussure bequeathed a decisive binary model to PMT. Language is a sign system that functions by an operational code of binary oppositions. We have seen one binary opposition: Sr/Sd. Another crucial binary opposition is syntagma/paradigm, which operates as follows:

Syntagmatic series (also called contiguity or combination): the linear
relationships between linguistic elements in a sentence.
Ex: He shut the door
Paradigmatic series (also called selection or substitution): the
relationship between element within a sentence and other elements
which are syntactically interchangeable
Ex: He shut door
She closed window

This binary contrast of combination and substitution generates higher
degrees of complexity and account for the imaginative or symbolic use
of language: the possibility of meaningful fictions:

Syntagmatic combination involves a perception of contiguity which can
generate
Metonymy (naming an attribute or adjunct of the thing instead of the
thing itself: crown for royalty
Synecdoche (naming the part for the whole: keels for ships)

Paradigmatic substitution involves a perception of similarity which
can generate
Metaphor: a tower of strength, a glaring error: descriptions which are
not literally true.

Roman Jakobson (1895-1982), a Russian-born linguist, applied Saussure's binary model to aphasia, a severe speech disorder caused by brain damage. Jakobson identified 2 distinct kinds of aphasic disturbance

Aphasics who suffer from (paradigmatic) substitution deficiency will resort to metonymic expressions: when asked to identify "black", the patient may respond "black".

Those deficient in (syntagmatic) combination are confined to using smilarity or metaphor.

In traditional literary criticism, metaphor and metonymy had always been thought of as related figures of speech. They are not related but opposed. The consequences of this is extended discourses in which either the metaphoric (paradigmatic/substitutution/selection)
(poetry) or metonymic (syntagmatic/combination/contiguity) order
predominates

Semiotics (semiology)
Saussure and Jakobson's binary order has applicatonns that extend into
other "discourses" besides the text, and this is the domain of
semiotics (from the Greek semeion, a mark, sign, trace or omen).
Saussure opened the way to analyzing culture itself as a system of
signs by proposing that structural linguistics was part of semiotics,
a general science if signs which studies the various systems of
cultural conventions which enable human actions to signify meaning and
hence become signs.

Structural Anthropology
Claude Levi-Strauss (1908-2009), following Saussure and the Slavic linguists Jakobson and N.S. Trubetzkoy, developed structural anthropology in the late 1950's which systematized a semiotics of
culture. Anthropology is a cultural model for understanding how the
human mind universally functions. At this time in the 1950's, the binary code had been applied in cybernatics and the rapid development of digital computers. This technological binarism--the digitalized aspect of information theory--influenced LS towards a mechanical
theory of communication.

Language is the system that permits thinking. Thinking is the "system-
output" that occurs in the interaction between human subjects (situated within culture) and the environment (nature) which is the
object of thinking.
Binarism
Nature<----------------------->Culture
(non-human) (human)

Thinking can therefore occur because language allows us (1) to form
social relationships and (2) to categorize our environment as
represented by symbols.

Among many primitive peoples it is the custom for each tribe or family to adopt some object from Nature as their special symbol, or totem.
This totem may be an animal or plant, or a carving in wood or stone, and is supposed to be helpful to the tribe it represents. Tribes which have an animal totem will never kill that special animal. Totemism is not some primitive bizarre superstition, but a basic instance of logic. It is thinking.
Totems see categories that specify (divide up) what is "out there" as symbols for thinking, in other words, binary classifications.
What can or cannot be eaten (and why).
Who can or cannot be married (and shy).

Thinking in this sense is literally (re)producing society.
How is the binarism human/non-human reflected in totemism?

Tribal societies apply substitutions (metaphors) and combinations (metonyms) to "think" about non-human nature. Animals and vegetables are simply things to eat but are read as codes that link nature to
human society by way of the "higher" (non-human) gods. This is a code-
chain that runs two ways.
The human mind functions in model binary sets: noise/silence, raw/
cooked, naked/clothed, light/darkness, sacred/profane and so on.
The mind works logically (that is culturally) unconsciously to duplicate nature. Example: why have we chosen the cora green, yellow, and red for our traffic- light sign system?
Because our color code signals for Go-Caution-Stop mimic the same structure in nature.

Critique of Structuralism
1. Dematerialization and formalism
Saussure's deep structures have nothing to with the Freudian unconscious. Structural analysis is an abstract "surface" reading as opposed to a Marxist or Freudian "deep" reading which thinks in terms of symptoms--origins, causes, and cures.
Although Jakobson does not deny the material (neurogical) origin and reality of aphasia, his analysis seems to de-materialize and formalize it.
S opens out a formal area of inquiry, a non-dimensional space of abstraction, which seems to resemble philosophy ("thinking about thinking") and its exclusive reliance on the rules of reasoning to arrive at a general picture of the world.

2. Formalizing the human
In "I think therefore I am", the "I" is a language fiction, signified by use, not meaning, and generated in much the same way as metaphor or metonymy.
S is unhelpful in explaining what motivates the language-using subject, i.e., the speaker.

3. Non- historical
S's analysis is valid (in principle) no matter what is historically present.

Post-structuralism

In the middle of 1960's, Roland Barthes came up with the overlap of S and the post-structuralist second thoughts. Linguistics is not part of semiotics, a science of signs; it's the way around. Barthes is saying that semiological analysis collapses back into language, a forerunner of Baudrillard's more radical notion of "art totally penetrating reality", of the border between art and reality vanishing as the two
collapse into the universal simulacrum. A collapse into total semblance.

The Death of the Author
In 1967, B caused a sensation by proclaiming that readers create their own meanings, regardless of the author's intentions

Writing: Degree Zero
You can read a text for pleasure and sense, but you're finally left with a sense of enigma, a final sense which the text doesn't express or refuses to surrende--a sort of unyielding thoughtfulness, it is like the thoughtfulness of a face which tempts one to ask..."what are you thinking?". This is the zero degree of writing---a closure, a retreat and a suspension of meaning.

Poststructuralist Blues

No Exit from Language:
A metalanguage is a technical language, such as Structuralism, devised
to describe the properties of ordinary language. Wittgenstein had already come up against the limits of logic as a metalanguage in the 1920's. You cannot stand outside language to understand it.

Structuralism, semiotics, and other forms of metinguistics which promised liberation from the enigma of meaning, only lead back to
language, a no exit, and the consequent dangers of a relativist or
even nihilist view of human reason itself. Deconstruction, an offshoot of poststructuralism, has been excused of "relativizing" everything.

Deconstruction
Derrida (b. 1930) has targeted Western philosophy's central assumption of Reason which he sees as dominated by a "metaphysics of presence".
Reason has been shaped by a (dishonest) pursuit of certainty.
Logocentrism desires a perfectly rational language that perfectly represents the real world. Words would literally be the Truth of things--the "Word made flesh", as St. John puts it.
Derrida is outraged by the totalitarian arrogance implicit in the claims of Reason. His outrage does not seem so eccentric when we recall the shameful history of atrocities committed by rationalist
Western cultures: the systematic "rationality" of mass extermination
in the Nazi era, the scientific rationalism of the A bomb, and the
Hiroshima holocaust.

Against the essentialist notion of certainty of meaning, Derrida mobilizes the central insight of structuralism--that meaning is not inherent in signs, nor in what they refer to, but results purely from the relatinships between them. He draws the post-structuralist implications of this point--that structures of meaning (without which nothing exists for us) include and implicate any observers of them. To observe is to interact, so the "scientific" detachment of structuralists or of any other rationalist position is untenable.

According to Derrida, there is nothing outside the text. By "text" he means the semiotic sense of extended discourses, i.e., all practices of interpretation which include, but are not limited to, language. Structuralism's insight to this extent was correct. It was incorrect to suppose that anything reasoned is ever universal, timeless, and stable. Any meaning or identity (including our own) is provisional and relative, because it is never exhaustive. It can always be traced further back to a prior network of differences, and further again, almost to finity or the "zero degree" of sense. This is deconstruction---to peel away like an onion the layers of constructed meanings.

Deconstruction is a strategy for revealing the underlayers of meanings
in a text that were suppressed or assumed in order for it to take its
actual form-- in particular the assumptions of "presence" (the hidden
representations of guaranteed certainty). Meaning include identity (what it is) and difference (what it is not) and it is therefore continuously being "deferred". Derrida invented a word for this process, combining difference and deferral: differance.

Art and Power/knowledge

Michel Foucault (1926-84) is the postmodern theorist most directly concerned with the problems of power and legitimation.
He tackles power from the angle if knowledge as systems of thought
which is socially legitimated and institutional, that is, controlling.
Foucault called his investigations of knowledge an archaelogy of epistemes (from the Greek epistomai, "to understand, to know for certain, to believe", which gives us epistemology, the verification theory of knowledge concerned with distinguishing genuine from spurious knowledge).

F upsets our conventional expectations of history as something linear, a chronology of facts that tell a story which makes sense. Instead, he uncovers the undrrlayers of what is kept suppressed and unconscious in and throughout history--the codes and assumptions of order, the structures of exclusion that legitimate the epistemes, by which societies achieve their identities.

By the mid 1970's, Foucault from the archaeology towards the genealogy
of what he called power/knowledge and he focused more on the
"microphysics" of how power moulds everyone (and not only its victims)
involved in its exercise. He showed how power and knowledge depend on each other. In so doing, the reason of rationalism requires--even creates--social categories of the mad, criminal, and deviant against which to define itself. It is thus sexist, racist, and imperialist in practice.

What is power?
Power cannot only be coercive. It also has to be productive and enabling. Power would be a fragile thing if its only function were to repress. Foucault criticized tbe Marxist-Freudian liberation model of society as a natural instinct repressed by authoritarian famial and social institutions.

Fiction of the Self
French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan (1901-81) applies Saussure's linguistics to explain how the mind comes to be structured and inserted in a social order. Lacan replaces Freud's classic trinity of the psyche--Id, Ego, Superego--with structures of the Imaginary, the Symbolic, and the Real which represent the stages of human psychic maturation.

L's most famous pronouncement: "The language is structured like a language". The unconscious functions by signs, symbols, metaphors, and in this sense it is like a language. But Lacan's point is that the unconscious only comes to exist after language acquisition.

Two examples of PM feminism

Luce Irigaray (b. 1932, Belgium)
Women have been assigned no place in history. Only by metonymy do they exist as a possibility for men. They appear as exterior representations either of something else--monuments of Justice, Liberty, Peace...or as objects of men's desire.

That leaves only two possibilities: either there is no feminine
sexuality except as men imagine it or feminine sexuality is a schizoid
duality (a) subordinate to the needs and desires of men (b) autonomous
and explorable only within a radically separatist women's movement.
As a result of these views, the psychoanalyst Irigaray was expelled from the Lananian psychoanalytical school in 1974.

Julia Kristeva (b. Bulgaria, 1941), pioneer semiotician and
psychoanalyst, agrees with Irigaray in refuting the Freudian and
Lacanian accounts of identity which place the feminine outside the
process of self-constitution.

Kristeva goes to an extreme in rejecting the category itself of "women". She refuses to believe in an "essential" woman, a fixed gender, and tries to project a Subject beyond the categories of gender. She is impatient with liberal emancipatory feminism, asserting that the main egalitarian demands have been largely met.

The End of the Story
Emancipationist political activity of any kind depends on a model of
linear purposeful time in which the historical achievements of one
generation are passed on to the next. This is the modernist modernist model of history in which deliberate acts of self-assertion progress towards the realization of a distant idealized goal.

Marxism is the classic example of a long-term emancipationist goal guaranteed by history itself. However, Jean-Francois Lyotard maintains that the liberation of humanity is a self-legitimating myth, a "Grand Narrative" or a metanarrative, maintained ever since the Enlightenment succeeded in turning philosophy into militant politics.

Lyotard has defined the PM condition as "skepticism towards all metanarratives". Metanarratives are the supposedly universal,
absolute, or ultimate truths that are used to legitimize various projects, political or scientific. Examples are: the emancipation of humanity through that of the workers (Marx); the creation of wealth (Adam Smith); the evolution of life (Darwin); the dominance of the unconscious mind (Freud), and so on.
Lyotard prescribed this skepticism in 1979, ten years before the
Berlin Wall came tumbling down, and almost overnight the world
witnessed the total collapse of a Socialist Grand Narrative.

Lyotard confronted another metanarrative myth (besides the one of
political emancipation) which legitimized a modernist view of science.
This is the "speculative unity of all knowledge", the goal of German
Romantic philosophy maximized by the idealist metaphysics of G.W.F.
Hegel (1770-1831). This dream, exemplified by the modern university with all its "faculties" (a sort of departmentalized brain) and its intellectual specialists, is untenable because of the new nature of knowledge.
What's new is cyberspace information -processing which quantifies knowledge according to computer logic.
What's new is the production of a completely new type of knower.
"The old principle that the acquisition of knowledge is indissociable from the training of minds...is becoming obsolete and will become ever more so. The relationships of the suppliers and users of knowledge to the knowledge they supply and use is now tending...to assume the form already taken by the relationship of commodity producers and consumers to the commodities they produce and consume--that is, the form of value. Knowledge is and will be produced in order to be sold, it is and will be consumed in order to be valorized in a new production: in both cases, the goal is exchange. Knowledge ceases to be an end in itself, it loses its 'use-value'".

The irreversible change from knower to consumer of knowledge is the cornerstone of postmodernity. This is the real historic change which legitimizes PM, and not, as is usually claimed, the "change" to postmodern architecture.

Postmodernism which took shape in the 1970's might just have remained a European academic fad, except for two other successive developments which gave it real substance.

1. Science
- the new info technology and its aim: global cyberspace
- the new cosmology and its aim: The Theory of Everything
- the new progress in genetics and its aim: the Human Genome Project

2. Politics
-the popularity of neo-conservatism and risecof the Respectable Right
in the 1970's
-the collapse of the Berlin Wall symbolizing the complete triumph of a
free market economyover a socialist command economy.

Theories of Everything
Stephen Hawking has encapsulated a theory of the entire universe in
the last lines of his Brief History of Time (1987):

"...if we discover a complete theory, it should in time be understable
by everyone...it would be the ultimate triumph of human reason--for
then we will know the mind of God."

As science gets closer to this goal, it assumes postmodern relativist proportions. Relativism was introduced into science by Quantum
Mechanics. W. F. Heisenberg (1901-1976) introduced a measure of permanent uncertainty in science with his principle: the impossibility of predicting both the mass and velocity of a particle at any given
moment.

The "elementary" particle has turned out to be more and more elusive as we discover thatcthe atom not only consists of protons, neutrons, and electrons, but varieties of gluons, charms, quarks...in a seemingly infinite count. Elementary entities in nature are now regarded by some as strings rather than points. Many scientists see string theory, which has solved the problems of space-time and internal symmetries, as a way forward towards a theory of everything.

Hope is also pinned on the discovery of the Higgs boson, the so-called God particle, which is crucial to the understanding of the structure of matter--the discovery could lead to a single equation of the universe. New developments in mathematics, however, suggest there are serious limits to our scientific knowledge. The emerging theories of chaos and complexity demolish the notion of control and certainty in science.

Chaos can be defined as a kind of order without periodicity. Complexity is concerned with complex systems in which a host of independent agents act with each other to produce spontaneous self- organization. Both theories promise a postmodern revolution in science based on notions of holism, interconnection and order out of chaos and the idea of an autonomous, self-governing nature. Complexity grapples with big questions: what is life, why is there something rather than nothing, why do stock markets crash, why do ancient species remain stable in fossil records over millions of years, etc...While both chaos and complexity have forced us to ask sensible questions and to stop making naive assumptions, both are presented by their champions as theories of everything. Complexity, for example, is championed as "the Theory which includes the entire spectrum, from embryological development, evolution, the dynamics of ecosystems, complex societies, right up to Gaia: it's a theory of everything!"

Such totalizing tendencies in science have come under attack.
Critiques of science from several disciplines (sociology, philosophy, anthropology, and history) have attacked science for its notion of truth and rationality as well as the alleged objectivity of scientific method. All this criticism has established that science is a social process, that scientific method is little short of a myth, that scientific knowledge is in fact manufactured.

Postmodern science can be said to be in a condition of anarchy, a position affirmed as a good thing by the self-styled Dadaist philosopher of science, Paul Feyerabend.

"The only principle that does not inhibit progress is : anything
goes...Without chaos, no knowledge. Without a frequent dismissal of
reason, no progress...For what appears as 'sloppiness', 'chaos', or
'opportunism'...has a most important function in the development of those very theories which we today regard as essential parts of our knowledge…These ‘deviations’, thee ‘errors’, are preconditions of progress’. Against Method, 1988

The Anthropic Principle

We have seen how postmodern theories tend to belittle the human subject as a fictitious “construct”. Postmodern cosmology has put the human being back into the picture, indeed in the very forefront of the universe, with its anthropic principle which states that the human life has evolved in the way I has because the universe is of a certain size and a certain age.

At its strongest, the anthropic principle suggests human consciousness is somehow “fitted” to the universe, not only as a component but as an observation necessary to give the universe meaning. Quantum physicist Niels Bkhr (1885-1962) proposed that no phenomenon can be said to exist unless it is an observed phenomenon.

Genetics

Critics of the Human Genome Project argue that the reduction of the human being to no more than the biological expression of the program of instructions in his DNA will have serious moral consequences of how we look at ourselves.

Determinists are hunting for the “Cinderella” gene, those particular genes which in isolation pre-determine just about everything from intelligence to homosexuality, free market entrepreneurs and male dominance. If we accept that innate differences and abilities are written in our genes and biologically inherited, then hierarchy is actually encoded in human nature. The world is the way it is because that is exactly how it should be. A proposed scientific explanation thus becomes the instrument for legitimizing the status quo.

PART TREE: THE GENEALOGY OF POST MODERN HISTORY

Postmodernism cannot follow in sequence after modernism, because this would be an admission of historic progress and a relapse into Grand Narrative mythology.

Architecture claims to have a precise date for the inauguration of postmodernism. At 3;32 p.m. on 15 July 1972, the Pruitt-Igoe housing development in St. Louis, Missouri, a prize-winning complex designed for low income people, was dynamited as uninhabitable. According to Charles Jencks, this proclaimed the death of the International Style of modernist architecture, the end of buildings as “machines for living” envisioned for us by Mies van der Rohe, Gropius, Le Corbusier and other abstract functionalists.

Po Mo Vernacular
Also in 1972, the American architect Robert Venturi 9b. 1925) formulated the postmodern creed. In place of unilateral “glass boxes”, po mo architecture offers the vernacular, an emphasis on the local and particular as opposed to modernist universalism. This means a return to ornament, with references to the historic past and its symbolism, but in the ironic manner of parody, pastiche and quotation.

Venturi and other postmoderns propose a “comicstrip” architecture---electric, ambiguous, humorous, in short, unpretentious. An example of this is Philip Johnson (a defector from High Modernism) who produced the New York A. T. &T. Building in the shape of a grandfather clock topped off with a Chippendale broken pediment.

Computerizing Difference

Modernist experimenters failed to change the world of capitalism---in fact , the utopian purity of their glass towers ended by glorifying the power of banks, airlines and multinational corporations. Similarly, po mo architects cannot avoid being employees of late capitalism. They cannot invent a “history” simply by changing the look of buildings. Besides, po mo architecture continues to use the construction materials and the mass production techniques of modernism, but with an added novelty: computer. Theorists like Charles Jencks believe the computer can replace the stereotyped uniformity of modernism by multiplying difference.

Hypermodernism: The Memory Loss of Reality

We are entering an amnesiac zone of “ postmodernity” which should be called hypermodernism. The meaning of so-called postmodernism turns out to be technological hyper-intensification of modernism. Technology and economics merge and are disguised by alternative labels---post-industrial, electronic, services, information, computer-economy---each of which contributes to hyperreal processing and simulation. An example: olestra, a sucrose polyester of hyperreal fat. Olestra tastes like fat, acts like fat in cooking and will stain your stain if you drop some on it, but it’s in no sense a food because your digestive enzymes can’t get a grip on it. It’s digestively inert.

Cyberia

The term cyberspace was coined by science-fiction writer William Gibson in his novel Neuromancer and defined as “consensual hallucination”. The civilization springing up online is cyberia

A Walk on the Wild Side

The true neuromancer theorist of po mo Cyberia is Jean Baudrillard. Let’s walk with Beaudrillard into Virtual Reality.

Step 1. The image is a reflection of a basic reality.
Step 2. The image masks and perverts a basic reality.
Step 3. The image masks the absence of a basic reality
Step 4. The postmodern simulacrum: A pair of sneakers, expensive sreet-cred models sportswear having nothing with sport. The slogan advertising Nike Air Jordan goes like this: “Get some get some get some get some.’

Only (re)Produce

The opposite of knowledge is not ignorance but deceit and fraud. The last 25 years of the 20th century will go down in history as symptomatic of a total lack of originality. Our scanty resources of invention are all parasitically confined to reproduction. Everything apparently “new” –whether it be CDs, cyberspace Virtual Reality or even the DNA Genome Project and postmodern cosmology—is feeding on the originality of the past, on a data back not simply of information but of already experienced reality.

Why have we come to this unprecedented technologically-streamlined cannibalization? Could it be that we are commanded by an unconscious, biologically determined will ( a “selfish gene”) to proceed with the absolute demolition of the past for a reason that we cannot comprehend? Are we “wiping the slate clean” for the coming of the artificially engineered human?

This is a paranoiac vision of reproduction, a sci-fi pessimistic advent of the inhuman.

We might do better to reconsider Marx’s view of capitalist reproduction. The reality of capitalist production is that a process which unfolds in time. One cycle of production succeeded by another: a question of continuity in short, which is a problem of social and economic reproduction.

For capitalist production to be continuous in time, it must not only reproduce itself completely but expand the fundamental conditions of its mode of production. The question arises: How can this continuity of production be maintained, when the value and global extent of this production seem to result from individual decisions by thousands of businessmen who hide their intentions from each other?

And this is why everything “postmodern” so nakedly depends on and stems from reproduction. The game is about fabricating a sort of knowledge, which although it looks to be expanding and becoming accessible to a vast public on the internet superhighways, is in fact becoming industrially controlled.

So, when Lyotard replaces the traditionally-trained knower with the “knower as consumer”, he is not valoring either the ‘new” knower or the novelties of knowledge, but is implicitly acknowledging the omnipotence of the free market economy. The new-born consumer of knowledge enters with amnesia into an already established game of deceit. He is a myth of modernity.

Third World Postmodernism

What does postmodernism look like from a Third World perspective? Let’s look at music for a start.

Quawwali is the devotional music of India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. Of Sufi origins, it is sung to the simple rhythm of traditional drums and hand-clapping in praise of God, Prophet Muhammad, Ali the fourth Caliph of Islam, and classical Sufi masters. The postmodern revival of Quawwali owes a great deal to Martin Scorsese’s film The Last Temptation of Christ where Quawwali and other Islamic music provided passionate musical backing to a narrative that, ironically, tried to undermine the religious sanctity of its subject matter. But in the Subcontinent it has gone funky and is sung to a syncopated rock beat generated by synthesizers. What was designed to induce mystical ecstasy is now used to generate hysteria for rock music.

Traditional non-Western music has become fair game for postmodern appropriation. Music from Zaire, the Solomon Islands, Burundi, the Sahel, Iran, Turkey, and elsewhere is freely blended with New Age electronics and rock beats to make it palatable to Western tastes.

Modern Indian cinema and pop music, Malay hard rock and the work of postmodern novelists like Thailand’s Somtow celebrate PM wholeheartedly.
On the other had, South African jive music, contemporary Filipino film, the punk rock culture of Medellin cocaine slums in Columbia take a more critical stance towards PM. Kenyan ovelist Ngugi wa Thiongo’s decision to abandon the novel and mainly in Kikuyu and Rigoberta Menchu’s striking testimonial narrative of Indian resistance in Guatemala, I, Rigoberta Menchu, have transformed PM into a culture of resistance. Third World PM is as diverse as PM cultures themselves.

Religious revival in Latin America, India and the Muslim World is a reaction against PMs of both right and left. Whatever its political color, PM retains its penchant for hybridity, relativism, and heterogeneity, its aesthetic hedonism, its anti-essentialism and its rejection of “Grand Narratives” (of redemption). In Latin America, rightwing politics and religious fundamentalism, imported from the U.S., have made major inroads in poor and working class communities from Brazil to Guatemala. Elsewhere, the discourse of Liberation Theology aims to replace Eurocentric conceptions of both modernity and PM with an indigenous historical and cultural consciousness. The discourse of “Islamization of knowledge” promotes the same goals in the Muslim world.

The End of History

The book by American historian Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (1992) encapsulates and celebrates PM history as an actual reality. In a deliberately prophetic, evangelical tone, Fukuyama proclaims a New Gospel (from the Old English, godspel, “good news”) at the end of the millennium, which is a capitalist paradise as the end of history.

Jacques Derrida has turned the fire-power of deconstruction on Fukuyama’s “good news” which is jubilant liberal democratic capitalism has survived the threat of Marxism. Derrida warns us: this jubilation hides the truth from itself : “Never in history has the horizon of the thing whose survival is being celebrated been as dark, threatening and threatened.”

Curiously, F invokes Marx and his predecessor, the idealist philosopher, Hegel, to celebrate the triumph of capitalism. Both Marx and Hegel believed that evolution of human societies was not open-ended, but would end when mankind had achieved a form of society that satisfied its deepest and most fundamental longings. Both thinkers posited the “end of history”. For Hegel, this was the liberal state, for Marx, it was a communist society. F employs teleology in arriving at his conclusion about the “end of history”. Teleology (from the Greek, telos, “end”) assumes that developments are shaped by an overall purpose or design. The “end’ of history according to F means several things: (1) history in which Marxism played a role has ended, (2) because of a purpose, (3) which is that history has reached its end, i.e., a supreme goal which is liberal democracy, “the only coherent political aspiration that spans different regions and cultures around the globe.” This global move towards liberal democracy goes together with a free market economy. Their alliance is “good news”.

A dialogue among three men:

A (Wissai): Not all parts of the world are heading towards liberal democracy? Think of China, Vietnam, North Korea, Cuba (all communist states!), Myanmar, Iran and a bunch of states in the Middle East and almost all the pathetic states in Africa.
B (Fukuyama): While “some” (sic!) present-day countries fail to achieve stable liberal democracy, the ideal of liberal democracy could not be improved on.
C (Derrida): Wrong! Democracy can be improved on, because it has yet to come. It is a defective reality in the present, not a utopia which is already an event.

If the “end of history” is teleological, the second half of F’s title “the Last Man” involves eschatology (from the Greek eskhatos, “last”) is Christian theology’s doctrine of the Last Judgment or what your present behavior will earn in the future. F also refers to Nietzsche’s prophecy of the “supermen” who will replace today’s decadent “last men”.

Another dialogue among three men:

D: F celebrated the dominance of a Christian Eurocentric history.
E: It excludes all other histories, unless they are “spiritually” converted to the liberal democracy and the free market.
B (Fukuyama himself): That’s why the Islamic world (a world of more than one billion adherents!), in my view, can be disregarded. It doesn’t enter into the general consensus which is taking shape around liberal democracy.

Derrida wonders why F’s book of “good news” was enthusiastically received in the West at the moment of capitalist victory over Marxism? why the need of reassurance of capitalist survival? Derrida view the book as a media-gadget that responds perfectly to the PM condition of virtuality. Capitalism’s media triumph conceals the truth that it has never been more fragile, threatened, catastrophic. Something else has surpassed both the Marxism figure-headed by a totalitarian Soviet bloc and its liberal free market opponent. This something is a set of hyperreality transformations in the spheres of science, technology, and economics which put our traditional notions of “democracy’ in grave doubt.

The crux of postmodernity is that there are two “presents”. One is a “specter” present, a Virtual Reality techno-media simulacrum that makes the other “real” present appear borderline, fugitive, elusive. A de-materialization of the real is making our opposition to its ineffectual. Against the insolent postmodern Gospel that dares to proclaim liberal democracy as the realized “end” of human history, Derrida protests: “…never have violence, inequality, exclusion, famine, and thus economic oppression affected as many human beings in the history of the Earth and of humanity…no degree of progress allows one to ignore that never before, in absolute figures, have so many men, women, and children been subjugated, starved or exterminated on the Earth…”

Derrida is the bad conscience at Marx’s funeral. His disapproval of F’s brand of neo-rightwing PM, passing off as “liberal”, means that he has to back-pedal and admit the Marxist element in deconstruction.

Fourth World War

We have undergone three World Wars so far. The Third ended with the Cold War defeat of Communism in 1989. Each of these wars went further in the direction of a single hegemonic world order and increasingly unpredictable resistance to it. The current “war on terror” can be viewed as the Fourth World War, with the United States leading the war and she is not winning for the following reasons: (1) her allies are lukewarm and noncommittal (2) her economy ill affords it (3) her knee-jerk support of Israel—a state which practices terror itself on its Palestinian subjects, contributes to the solidarity of its opponents, Radical Islam which views its long period of subjugation and exploitation at the hands of the Christian West and the occupation of Palestine by the Zionists no longer tolerable (4) history has shown that it is very difficult to combat the alliance of emotionalism (religion) and nationalism. China is waiting for the U.S. to exhaust herself in her almost solo, expensive, interminable war on terror. China will then come in and kick the U.S. into the dust bin of history as a spent, exhausted, poorly led former world power.

China is poised to replace the U.S. as a single hegemonic world power with unforeseen consequences to the world, unless the U.S. is to reverse course and achieve some understanding and truce with the elements of Radical Islam. The current efforts by the right wing in the U.S. to demonize Islam would just ensure American exhaustion and eventual defeat. America seeks high-tech immunity from the virus of terrorism, but terrorism is a low-tech pathogen. It cheats the system by playing its ace card of suicide.

Islamist terrorism is a postmodern clone of the cold war. The United States and her nominal allies, especially Britain, risk chemical, biological, and dirty bombs attacks to the extent the Cold War left an immense scrap-yard of such deterrents in the former Soviet Union and other unstable countries.

However, hope springs eternal. Several elements in the U.S. still think the U.S. can still win the war by virtue of Al Queda’s extremism and excesses which eventually will force the mainstream Islam to revolt and join forces with the U.S. to defeat the common enemy.

Neo-Darwinist evolutionary psychology

Islamic culture finds itself implicated in terrorist regression. Is any culture able to resist global homogenization? Resistance assumes that culture is consciously autonomous. But is it? Survival depends on what we believe, what we do and how we see others. What if these tactics of culture are precoded conditions of behavior? This is the view of neo-Darwinist evolutionary psychology. Cultures are themselves products of Darwinian natural selection, just like our genes, and are generated unconsciously like everything else in the universe. Richard Dawkins coined the term “memes’ as the cultural equivalents of selfish genes. Memes are the elementary, reproducible components of culture that transcend individual carriers.

So, if culture is meme-structured and genetically patterned, if we are trapped in our symbols, customs, religions, languages, and so forth, then we are in fact blinded and handicapped by our cultures. What chance do we have of resisting our own limits, unless, a tendency to a single universally homogenous culture is also pre-programmed? Differences of culture are doomed to leveling.

Conversion between two men:

Darwin: In your “meme” script, conscious mind do not count at all..
Dawkins: Not quite, we are gifted with understanding the “blind forces” that gave us all existence. Science is impossible without imagination, but we are still embedded in the Darwinian “algorithm of natural selection”.

Beyond our Conscious Perception

String Theory is the novelty in sub-particle physics (and that perhaps explain why all beings, humans especially of course, respond to music, the sounds being harmonized). It only makes sense in a 10-dimensional world, imperceptible to us, because the extra dimensions are wrapped invisibly small. String theory might just be wacky “post”-physics but it conforms to the modernist scientific spirit of reducing everything--including our consciousness--to smallest bits in its quest for the Grand United Theory of Everything. Reality eludes us more with each step in diminution. We have forgotten the existentialist dictum of Sartre (1905-1980 who turned down a Nobel Prize in Literature!): “What we call freedom is the irreducibility of the cultural order to the natural order.” Sartre said that reductionism would not answer the question: “How is it that matter can have ideas?”

Wissai
Feb 1, 2010