swimming in the ocean

oh man,
this class has been overwhelming me.
...and i do really appreciate that; thanks everyone.

i've been writing a lot, but rather tangentially to the specific materials we've been dealing with in our course. as we draw to a close, and with my eye on the 'final paper' post i'll be gathering together over the next couple of weeks, i'm going to take a stab here at some rather scattered, wide ranging talking points that i've been savoring throughout the course.

1. philosophy of history: do we really know what history is? i don't think so, because i'm pretty sure that we don't really know what time is. i think that this seems like kindof a minor problem to most people, occupied with more 'practical' considerations, but to me it seems to be affiliated with the strange and compelling thematic repetition that we've been observing throughout our readings this semester, from plato to carr (quite the odd couplet ; ).

the issue of time is, i think, intrinsically bound up with the issue of communication. how? consider that all of our eminent theorists of communications base their theses, their interventions, their judgements of the techniques in question, like Plato has Thamus judging Theuth's invention in the Phaedrus, on diagnostic assessments of the effects of these techniques. and in each case when the adoption of the new technique is ruled against, it is on the grounds that its effects on the status quo will be unacceptable: writing will destroy memory; print will destroy the clergy; industry will enslave the proletariat; internet will destroy our ability to concentrate...
on the other hand, when the new techniques are celebrated, it is because they will ameliorate social conditions; writing will allow thinkers to imagine the ideal politeia; print will create a free space for universally accessible 'public reason;' industry will free the bourgeoisie; the internet will finally displace the cultural elites...

this reminds me of Derrida's treatment of the pharmakon in his essay Plato's Pharmacy, in which he draws attention to this radical ambiguity of technology; Plato condemns it, but uses it to do so! consequently, arguments that attempt to focus on one or the other 'side' of this ambiguity -through what i've been thinking of as moralizing arguments, which attempt to define the technique in question in either positive or negative terms- will always dissimulate the techniques themselves; will be unable to grasp their full range of affective and effective potentials.

so how does time play in all this?

i think that this problem of the technique as pharmakon -as an entity that resists objectification, or better, definition; encryption- rather than being a kind of historiographical anomaly, is in fact representative of a problem that haunts not only history, but all of language, and such as we are able to think them as languages, all techniques of thinking and remembering. the problem of assessing and predicting novelties, a problem that we as humans -homo fabers- seem destined to continue to face, cannot be reduced to empiricism. nor, as Sen points out, can it be reduced to principle. it must rather oscillate in the space between these polar positions, which are only imaginary anyway, and to the extent that they can be definitively described, encoded, can only be approached asymptotically. when historiography comes up against technique, even though it tries to materialize it, to locate it in the realm of the solid and definite, the known, it can only do so in such a way that it compromises its own observational neutrality in the process. in our haste to grasp the truth of language, or of technology, we end up using it more blindly than even in order to pursue its image in our minds.

and here we find ourselves faced with a temporal problem. i would call it the problem of recursion: how are we to go about pursuing the instrumentation of pursuit? what if the technique described by Husserl as epokhe can indeed never be completed, but must be observed, as a kind of categorical imperative; like Kant's own method of critique, not a solid ground, but a melete -a practice; a self-imposed discipline?!

more soon...