Thinking the Time of History Writings

A series of blog posts responding to writing prompts for an introductory seminar on Continental Philosophy at The Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc), instructor Jake Matatyaou, 2014

Week 2: Why do you think Arendt says that “this small non-time-space in the very heart of time” – the gap between past and future – “can only be indicated, but cannot be inherited and handed down from the past.”

It seems the present has become a fleeting second, at once digested into the lineage of the past and superseded by the immense of the future. Arendt’s placement of man between the mechanics of these two temporalities is provocative in its assertion that we might finally, given enough effort to become aware of the implications the past and future hold on our present, attain the ability to engage thought. In doing so, the prospects of our newfound agency over our interactions between these two forces become quite enticing, but a question arises about the irrevocable scarring we carry from what we experience. For example, imagine we look at this photo of some Boeing 747 in 1987.

Assuming our ambivalence to its eventual fate, nothing particularly striking emanates. The scene drifts unbeknownced into our past. Now, in another photo (https://tinyurl.com/oum5xur), we gaze at the severed nose of the exact same jetliner one year later, after a bomb downed it over Scotland. Having seen one thing in such disparate conditions, arbitrated by the progression of time and history, how are we, in retrospect, to un-see the horrors of the second image in order once again to see objectively what we once so innocently looked beyond in the first? To straddle Arendt’s sliding line between what was and what will be, it seems we must overcome the disjointed poignancy of what we do (or do not) already know, but how?

Week 3: To what degree do we live in an enlightened age?

If we are to take our reasoning as symptomatic of humanity’s progression from primeval barbarity, as Kant decrees, then we surely do live in an Enlightened Age, rampant with scientific method and mathematical formulae. Man delves ever deeper into a more nuanced understanding of his position in the world. Still, in the centuries since Kant’s death, we have witnessed the self-implosion of reason and rationality. The mechanics of Man’s progression forward have stalled in the haze of an industrialized world. It seems Enlightenment has come to stand as an ends to its own means, a cyclical pseudo-myth for which we often fail to question the extents we find ourselves willing to traverse in order to execute its will. Kant never beheld such horrors as World War II, and so we cannot fault him for the twisted exploits made in the name of his earnest reasoning. While statistical (scientific) observation might posit that we indeed have progressed in terms of our once nomadic cruelties, numbers fail to comprehend accurately the individual human existences which populate (and preeminently depopulate) humanity’s wrongdoings. Though perhaps enlightened, our elixir has misregistered the human paranoia which makes the irrational from the rational and employs reason as its justification. These analytical techniques we use to remap the world have, without our moral consideration, instead wrought the very reversal of Kant’s thesis, driving backwards and at once obscuring in their insidious alibi (rationality) the atrocities still prevalent in the Modern world.

Week 4: How does Baudelaire define modernity? What is the attitude of modernity that Foucault identifies in Baudelaire?

A self-actualized will of the artist to instill in his creations the essence of his moment, Baudelaire’s interpretation of modernity is intriguing in its slippages (for their qualities both potential and problematic) – in other words, its refusal towards temporal confinement. This provocation to investigate “the ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent, the half of art whose other half is the eternal and the immutable” (Baudelaire 13) productively feeds Foucault’s catalyzation of the concept, which we might paraphrase as recasting this Modern attitude into a duty of the author to curate or to create, rather than thoughtlessly regurgitate, his stance in the timeline of humanity (Foucault 42). What seems here both fertile and precarious is its ramifications for man’s self-understanding of the present in relation to the past. After all, all history has been conceived by human beings, many of whom presumably shared our sensibilities towards happiness, sadness, compassion or hatred.

How are we, in our constructions of or from the present, to imbue or at least to recognize these underlying instruments which have continuously woven the threads of human existence? In this anachronistic tendency between the ephemeral history of peoples and the eternal basics of the human experience, a complete confinement to the present seems ominous in its inability to enter a larger dialogue. When, in their portraits of the past, Sofia Coppola dresses Marie Antoinette in Converse and plays her New Order or Derek Jarman gives Caravaggio a motorcycle*, we find exemplary reminders that, in the end, we are all humans for whom the present condition is less defined by its shackles than by a porous affinity to its boundary with the past.

Week 5: How does Nietzsche distinguish between monumental, antiquarian, and critical history?

Not until after reading a particular passage by Nietzsche in both translated English and its original German was I faced with an uneasy fragility of my own language (or anyone’s, for that matter), the ramifications of which completely changed my previous interpretation. In framing us towards our own history, we find a kind of unique literalness in the German “Dasein”, which has in this text been translated with some loss of fidelity to “Existence”. This singular term” cannot bear the weight of the particular ‘placefulness’, or physicality, which Nietzsche appears to have imbued in his original words. A shrouded command of pragmaticism rings out in the word’s native use which dares us to live less in our minds than in our world. After all, even the work’s title (“On the *Uses* and Disadvantages…”) infers an applicability of our agency over our lineage, especially in a time when past and future have become more maliciously finagled in the present than passively interpreted in retrospect.

If we resurvey Nietzsche’s proclamations in the wake of this Teutonic reclamation of the word’s meaning, artifacts gain a certain dichotomy, such as the curious differentiation between the verbiage in “he lives best who has no respect for existence” (“der am schönsten lebt, der das Dasein nicht achtet”) (Nietzsche 69) versus “it should be made quite clear how unjust the existence of something or other is…and how much this thing really merits destruction” (“es soll eben gerade klarwerden, wie ungerecht die Existenz irgendeines Dinges…ist, wie sehr dieses Ding den Untergang verdient.”) (Nietzsche 76). Note the use of “Existenz”, inferring a more current materialization of the illnesses, rather than “Dasein”, seemingly a more physically removed preoccupation.

It stands then that a poignantly targeted distinction is made between one’s contemplation of reality as something quite literally here in the immediate presence of oneself, or as a distantly approaching fog, a haze of the past from which we always flee yet to which we nonetheless forfeit our understanding, far before its dissipation reveals for us what actually lies beneath. In the monumental, critical and antiquarian alike we find this problematization of stance, where our comprehension of our current self is placed in something “da”, something unproductively estranged from our physical being and agency.

Week 6: In what sense does Foucault use the word origin? Why does genealogy oppose the pursuit of origins? Consider the ways in which genealogy challenges the traditional aims and practices of the historian.

Like water from some distant, untouched spring, we tend to believe that the sediment of history merely muddies our waters, leaving their inherent transparency frothy, impure and diluted. Foucault is quick to identify that this has driven a certain fetishization around the origin of any concept on the part of historians (“Nietzsche, Genealogy, History” 79). We rummage across the past to construct for ourselves convenient lineages, many of which seemingly leave us at the pinnacle of history, the culmination of a supposed ‘progress’.From this vantage, it becomes facile to overlook the more troublesome shades of our contemporary condition.

Rather than deifying the origin in and of itself, Foucault’s call to genealogy elicits the excavation of ideas from the innumerable mutations and bastardizations they undergo while passing through time (81). To what extent then should we honor any idea if it has the innate ability to take up whichever countenance we apply to it? Does any certainty or conviction remain? This ‘wirkliche Historie’ leaves in its wake a desolate field of disassembled ideas, which, though perhaps better understood in their rightful identities, area problematic in leveling the foundations on which so much has been built.

What are we to do with these cultural currencies for which genealogy supplants the falsehoods of conventional history? How do we tell someone that part of his identity, something foundational to his frame of being, is invalid? That “fathers have only to mistake effects for causes…and the bodies of their children will suffer” (82) implicates us all in the grand ruse of humanity. Though we may become at least somewhat sapient of our impairment, what action must we take? Our identity, historically speaking, may be a falsehood, but the meaning we extrapolate therefrom is by no means inherently invalidated.

Week 7

Some 34 years after Marx’ death, Russian literary theorist Viktor Shklovsky commented in an essay on literature that “Habitualization devours works, clothes, furniture, one’s wife and the fear of war. ‘If the whole complex lives of many people go on unconsciously, then such lives are as if they had never been.’” (Shklovsky 778). Of course, Shklovsky was gazing across a cultural upheaval of the Russian status quo for which we can attribute a great deal of its political ethos to Karl Marx. In more ways though than mere consequence, Shklovsky’s observation accurately distills Marx’ condemnation of complacency. Buried in the banalities of the everyday, many of us fall victim to a system in which we are valued solely as our material production, alien to our existences as individuals (Marx 154, 173). This is to say, we become worthless for our personhood, appraised instead for our ability to feed a series of regimes for which we ourselves are expendable.

Unable to see beyond our immediate existence, we come to value the qualities of our lives as innate to our existence. Thus, we accept power structures because they are and connect political ideologies to those who enact them upon us as if they are inherently linked. On this regard, Marx continuously seems to reference the promise of a kind of detachment, or defamiliarization. In removing the “self-determining concept” of our present, we gain a more productive stance, from where we might look back at ourselves and interrogate the imminence of the conditions in our lives (Marx 175). If we can break this complacency with the given nature of our identities, we become free to evaluate objectively, to break from what we inherit and to rethink anew what we take for granted.

Please note that, in the employed quote, Shklovsky actually quotes another essay, “The Accumulation of Identical Liquids in Practical and Poetic Language” (1917), by Leo Jaskubinsky.

Week 8: What is “the modern escape from politics into history”?

Repeatedly, we have seen a strange sort of pragmatics in philosophy arise to hold up the field’s importance to those within larger society. From Nietzsche to Marx, it seems that regardless of the specifics of a work, an inclination emanates which both uplifts and values philosophy as a force which can actively shape the world moving forward, a generative process in many ways. Crucial in the transaction between these philosophies and their worldly instantiations is the action itself (Arendt 79). For Arendt, the political act – that is to say, the direct dialogue between human beings – surrounding these philosophical inquiries appears to be pantomime to their comprehension. The final most (yet perhaps foregone) device in the lifecycle of an idea for transposing some metaphysical philosophy into material effect, Arendt laments the reduction of the modern age to a merely contemplative philosophy (83).

This is a process with measurable gains and benchmarks. It seems rather efficient to index the wandering aims of an active idea across history by tracing the physical trail it left, whether that be paved by hellish war or utopian construction. In all cases, the archeology of the idea is absolutely dependent on the result of some action. Particularly concerning and fascinating at once, though, is the apparent opportunity for the more contemporary, contemplative philosophy to exert its power in a currency totally unknown. Leaving no wake of material evidence, it leverages deafeningly our collective consensus against the necessity of factuality. Seemingly, its prominence is irrefutable. It is the intentional hijacking of the mechanism by which we dog-ear events in our existence as “meaningful” that empowers stealthily the contemplative. While Arendt is just in her accusation that we can find intriguing essentially whatever we set our sights to, this is precisely the cunning precision of the historical model of thought (87).

Given that we now stand far beyond the precipice of this shift in vantage, with what certainty can we even gaze back and assess the supposed lineage we have inherited? We find ourselves, it seems, in a constant state of skepticism with what we are told, exactly because the contemplative mark of historical inscription bears neither scar nor trace.

Week 9: What, according to Adorno and Horkheimer, is the relationship between enlightenment and myth?

“Human beings believe themselves free of far when there is no longer anything unknown. This has determined the path of demythologization of enlightenment, which equates the living with the nonliving as myth had equated the nonliving with the living.” (Adorno and Horkheimer, 11)

Some fifty millennia ago, Man began to stumble with heightened cognizance across the African plains. Perhaps, during some summer thunderstorm, a lightning bolt struck the dry grasslands of his territory, igniting an inferno. Man was faced with a situation beyond his explanation, a belittling moment which displaced his potency as the mere animal he was, aloof in a world seemingly so deterministic and circumstantial. Since this anecdotal instant, Mankind has vigorously sought the aid of comprehensive apparatuses in the face of his inexplicable existence. Though these methods have taken up a myriad of shapes through his history, their form remains constant – a forward quest to explain the world in terms of “how” and “why”.

Publishing Dialect of Enlightenment in 1947, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer were keenly aware of the dreary, horrid ramifications to which Man’s search for self-explanation might lead. “Magic like science is concerned with ends”, they indicate (7). Much like the mythology it chronologically subordinated, the lauded rationality and reason of the European Enlightenment reminds us in their failures that even our most supposedly objective investigations might truly be little more than an unaware ruse, a predetermined means for an end that might be willing to construct whatever road it finds necessary in order to reach its destination.

Myth and derailed scientific method alike fulfill Man’s desperation for self-determination before the fatalism of history. Given the context of Adorno’s and Horkheimer’s work, instances of pseudo-science cum ideology, the nascent medium for the obstruction of objectivity, like eugenics and or Lebensraum should forewarn us to the singular vision we risk appropriating when we so badly thirst to gaze across the world with competence and agency. Hannah Arendt implicates this self-destructive capacity Man holds to weave his own (and others’) fate, remarking that “ideologies always assume that one idea is sufficient to explain everything…” (Arendt 470).

Where then does this problematic dichotomy leave Man? In his attempts to explicate the shrubs and barren fields ablaze before him in the wake of their heavenly intervention, he skirts the possibility of blinding himself, but to let the flames flicker numbly before him is to nullify the very brilliance which both exposes him to these grave risks and holds the seminal key to his pioneering fortitude against the tarnish of time. How is Mankind to check itself constantly with a seemingly unrealistic stance of objectivity lest it fall prey to the power of its own will?