Thursday, March 13, 2014

Local and in Person, Represented and Global - From a Conversation with my Friend Louis


The sacred is one thing that interests me increasingly. The sacred is in one sense something very ordinary--something that all indigenous peoples seem to have a direct relationship with. Yet it is something that we moderns have lost touch with. At the fork in the road between older, indigenous ways of living and modern western rationalist ones, the west left the sacred behind.  Sacredness is a key issue that comes up in the recurrent face-offs between western development and indigenous peoples attempting to preserve their lands and ancient ways of doing things. The sacred, I believe, comes into appearance when people can embrace a certain type of “human limitation” that the west believes it escaped with the invention of writing and the technologies that this invention made possible. 

The “fork” in the road, I'm theorizing, occured when we went down the path of thinking that written language could fully capture “reality,” that the real could be “represented.” This fork in the road, according to the story I am piecing together from many different authors and personal experiences, can be located with Plato and the invention of the modern alphabet (see W. Ong, E. Havelock and I. Illich). The modern alphabet, invented around the time when Plato emerged, made it possible to de-localize or detemporalize language from in-the-moment oral speech through lasting representations; and this, in turn, made it possible at a whole new level to set up agreements, laws, models and representations as "truths"guiding or shaping how people related to their actual in-the-moment experiences over wide expanses of distance. This occurred in many forms: laws and policies could be promulgated across larger expanses of terrain much more readily and with much greater "standardization" than before possible.  Thinkers and scientists, as well as engineers and artisans, could now across great expanses of distance develop and work on the same problems together, etc. 

Writing is probably what made it possible for Plato to imagine an “ideal” conceptual realm that existed outside of time.  It is what made it possible for science and technology to set up a domain for thinking that is outside of in-the-moment experience, and instead located in a lonely Cartesian three-dimensional “space,” void of everything, and where everything can be generated by mathematics — leading to computer modeling (representation) of everything. This "space" of the represented, including prominently “computer modeling,” is the space we have been increasingly living in for a very long time. Our world is becoming more “virtual" by the minute. 

The great shift that is happening with the end of Western metaphysics, as it was announced by Nietzsche, can on one level be seen as our loss of total commitment to the Platonic divide between ideal-real and temporal experience, which I am equating with the divide between what can be “represented” and shared independently of local time and place, and what cannot.  

One thing that has happened today is that this “shift,” talked about by more thinkers everywhere, has become “news” -- which means that everywhere there is talk about a shift that is really all pseudo-shift. That is an unfortunate complication. (It's also related to the very topic we are discussing. Two people who are using the same "language" -- i.e. the same words -- seem to be talking about the same "thing"; but a little direct experience can soon show that in fact they are not.) 

If the fork in the road of which I'm speaking involved both a cultural commitment to truth as certainty of representation, and if going down this path at the same time involved a leaving behind of the sacred, then how does a re-contextualization of the representational within a larger picture include a new relationship to the sacred? That’s one way of posing the question.  Heidegger’s claim that modernity was characterized by a “withdrawal of the gods” speaks to the same thing, I believe. And I think it’s in line with Heidegger’s thinking to say that, with the west's reconceptualization of truth as “certainty of representation,” the west put human beings -- as the ones who make the (artificial) representations -- in the center in a new way. We set up the human subject as the ground and arbiter of Being, Heidegger might say. We took the "path of objectivity," in Maturana's terms. 

Once consequence of taking this path is that it gave rise to a class of expert "scientifically trained" professionals in the world, the masters (or priests) of representation, who have lorded it over all the “uneducated” of the world, usually put on a pedestal by the "uneducated" themselves. (These professinals include the economists and bankers who control economics based on their expert representations; money itself is a token, although not a representation – and this is probably one of the reasons that modern economists can’t “think” what money really is — they can only describe its current functioning in highly-sophisticated ways, because they are kind of like journalists and scientists who are limited to depicting what is "objectively," and so can’t generally tap the font of creativity that requires going into the imaginal realm, or that comes only when we can think of things in terms of dynamics and consequences and goals. Anyhow, this is going off track.) 

So what happens when we go beyond truth as certainty of representation as the only or the primary way of creating human consensus? 

We start to step off the platform of the representing subject. (For Arendt, this is the platform of homo faber.) And we start to valorize the platform of the vulnerable, experiencing subject.  We start to open ourselves to the unknown and to the mysterious, instead of only validating our (aggressive) procedures for knowing. 

When we open up like this, it’s like extending our arms and letting in the sky. All experience becomes legitimated, and our capacity to relate grows hugely. (We honor even the "uneducated for the capacity that they possess, a capacity that escapes the narrow criteria of valuation that the west has held to for centuries.) All of this opening up, letting in a wider expanse of experience, can have its scary components. What I expect we may discover: What will most hold us together in the overwhelming expanse is our proximity to one another and to local place. I.e., in some sense what will come to matter to us much more once again is our local community. And we will discover that our capacity for healthy local relations -- to our neighbors, to our friends, to local flora and fauna and geography, to our local civic experience -- will be the grounding source for health across wider expanses.





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