summa onto-theologica

We have traced a very interesting genealogy from the Greek conception of community, in what we could call its global form as the politeia, to its relatively local form in the agora. The agora is, as Foucault described in his most recently translated lectures The Government of Self and Others, the scene of the politeia's actualization, via the mechanism that centers these lectures: parresia ('free-spokenness'). This has been a very interesting text for me, reading concurrently with the course, since Foucault focuses on the comparison between the events at the end of the 5th century (bc), which form the subject of works by Thucidides and Euripides, and the events at the beginning of the 4th century, when Plato is writing about contemporary events...

Leaping forward to the Enlightenment and its Late Medieval and Renaissance preliminaries, we touched briefly on Kant's rather counter-intuitive distinction between public reason, accessible as a universal function of critical rationality (of the Kantian transcendental variety, we can be sure, and albeit, as Cochran pointed out, within the bounds of the newly literate bourgeoisie), and private reason, which would encompass the machinations of private interests along the lines of a pseudo-utilitarian 'hedonic calculus'.

Next, we shall continue our quick cruise through the advent of what McLuhan called 'the electronic age' of telegraphy, telephony, radio, television, and eventually (ultimately?) computation and the 'world wide web'.

In all these cases we have seen a set of similar occurrences accompanying what in each case we have identified as an instance of technical, or technological evolution: the advent of a new medium of communication -i.e. the 'scribal culture' that sprung up around the crystallization of the Greek alphabet (for Havelock, et al.), and the 'print culture' that emerged out of the invention of the printing press and its rapid fluorescence accompanying the Reformation and the advent of the European industrial economies (for Eisenstein and Cochran, etc.)- seems to have been accompanied by a massive shift in what we might call the 'subjectivity' of those affected by the novel conditions.

This hypothesis -that the media of communication shape and govern the subjectivities of the individuals and societies they serve- has massive implications for scholarly thought; we might divide these implications into synchronic (philosophical) -What effects do our current media exert on us?- and diachronic -How might we map these transformations historically? axes. But these axes also seem to fall together, and in a deeply troubling way- under lines of questioning like: "What implications might this have for our currently accepted notions of history and historical scholarship in general?!"

more on the way...