In response to Ruthie's perceptive comment on my last post:
I don't mean to imply via the generalization of this theory 'about art' that critical succession and the influential 'complex' that 'drives' should necessarily trivialize our theories 'about reality'. But doesn't the very idea of 'externally verifiable' reality imply a point of access independent of tradition? This is Plato's conjecture, right? If art is all there is, then Protagoras is basically right; education is basically the inculcation of civic virtue as a set of techniques. The technicality of virtue necessitates a submission to the tradition, to the teacher from whom you can learn these skills. The anxiety of influence implies both an attempt to escape from, and a critical engagement with the 'influence' of a tradition. The anxiety of submitting oneself completely to the authority of a teacher, representing a tradition thought as the reproduction of a set of technical proficiencies... I think the value of this line of thinking lies in its encouragement of critical, skeptical engagement with authority. The tricky part nowadays is that, within a(n American) political context that tends to value critical thought and individual freedom above obedient submission to authority -albeit theoretically- authority tends to want to present itself dissimulatively; as antiauthoritarianism. Cf. Republican populism a la Bill O'Reilly. This means that to really rebel, we should submit ourselves to a constructive engagement with history, rather than succumb to our anxiety about failing to embody the ideal of rugged individualism. Paradoxically, it is through abandoning this anxiety that we really individuate ourselves from the similarly (because ideologically-conditioned en masse) anxious crowd. Platonic rationalism and scientific empiricism can as easily be included in this category of 'ways in which we believe we should be critical, because we have been told to.'
I agree that this is a dangerous distinction; I think because of its subtlety: I just think that sometimes critical traditions are precisely the ones that need to be questioned, and that the only way to do that is to (provisionally) assume contrary beliefs. Perhaps this can be done in a pragmatic way, so that an artistic engagement with the past might allow us to experiment with new ways of being critical, by showing us new realities that we can be critical of. ?B
Nicely argued. I think I understand your point better now and particularly like your observation that knee-jerk anti-authoritarianism may be a contemporary form of conformity.
ReplyDeleteThanks ; ) The idea can also be framed (as Zizek, for example, does) with a certain notion of ideology; not as an explicit set of restrictions on what can be said, imposed by some central authority, but as a set of more or less believable propositional functions, among which we are all 'free to choose', but whose forms interarticulate to define a space of possible choices which becomes all the more inescapable for that 'freedom'. It is a very dangerous argument, with certain totalitarian overtones (like 'if freedom is so bad, how about we take it away and see how you like it'). I'm not making it up; we find it not only in Zizek, but very strongly developed in 'late' Foucault as well (where ideology becomes biopower). But I feel that in fact, the critical examination of so-called Freedom, so-called Liberalism, is exactly where liberalism has to go: inward. What alternative do we have? To go to war against reactionaries is precisely to become one. Of course there are limits to tolerance, and positions that need to be strategically defended, but we need a strategy that goes beyond defense, without reducing us to exactly what we fear. Why not instead transform the entire (meta)structure?
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