NOT-SURE-YET...
WHAT IF... Levinas Chose the Wrong Other?
It has been quite a week since Nervemeter and its co-pilot left. At the start of the week I realised Levinas might be completely of false consciousness. During the week I realised that structuralism is almost everything. Today I realised Kant is responsible for the embrace that art and philosophy have shared for 150 years. I suppose it was the kind of week that should have run in reverse.
Why do we throw names around and console ourselves that what we make has a bearing on existence? Really, we are exercising a faculty that Kant initiated. In the heroic Critique of Judgment the subjective is objectified. It is a very old idea but it is perhaps the most instrumental in the relational aesthetic brought forth now with work like nerve meter. While it may seem like it inhabits an almost complete vacuum in mass society it does not. It might be in the *margin but if it were not for the possibility of bringing the names and ideas of continental aesthetics to bear on it would be very much more in a vacuum.
To consider that a work like Nerve Meter inhabits an almost-vacuum is for it to equally inhabit almost everything. What is the bearing of D&G on the work? Well, the work has a purchase on material relations. Or does it? As boxes, cables, transmission and reception its a synaesthetic/linguistic model of the mega-network shorn of its threat to engulf us. In this sense it is something like Merleau-Ponty's aesthetics of reassurance, that for a while, it all might seem simple that we cannot but occupy nodal points in a muddled net.
What if Levinas was looking at the wrong other? "What if" comics used always engross me as a child. As an adult the fascination has moved over to the continental squad. In my episode for this week I am folding up and unfolding the question "what if Levinas chose the wrong other...". Without exploding the question of WW2, what if the priveleged other was malicious? As I understand it, in a war crimes tribunal the soldier cannot be held responsible for what the general ordered him to do. The reverse is however true, that the head of control can be punished for the body committing the act. The same is true to some extent of a corporation. Is Levinas suggesting the soldier's priveleging of his commanding other is in fact an ethical position prior to exercising critical faculty, which in this case might have meant ommission rather than commission of a malicious act? I think this cannot but be a submerged iceberg in the work of Levinas. An ethical relation with the other that comes before an ontological position could be perilous. Of course, the other that Levinas speaks of is possibly not such elastic an idea to stretch around this scenario. After all, it is just a hypothetical exercise.
What is the relationship between the problematised relation with the other and Kantian possibility and Mearleau-Ponty's reassurance found in our Nerve Meter? Almost nothing. In other words, almost everything. All of this attention is focused toward that remaining question.
It has been quite a week since Nervemeter and its co-pilot left. At the start of the week I realised Levinas might be completely of false consciousness. During the week I realised that structuralism is almost everything. Today I realised Kant is responsible for the embrace that art and philosophy have shared for 150 years. I suppose it was the kind of week that should have run in reverse.
Why do we throw names around and console ourselves that what we make has a bearing on existence? Really, we are exercising a faculty that Kant initiated. In the heroic Critique of Judgment the subjective is objectified. It is a very old idea but it is perhaps the most instrumental in the relational aesthetic brought forth now with work like nerve meter. While it may seem like it inhabits an almost complete vacuum in mass society it does not. It might be in the *margin but if it were not for the possibility of bringing the names and ideas of continental aesthetics to bear on it would be very much more in a vacuum.
To consider that a work like Nerve Meter inhabits an almost-vacuum is for it to equally inhabit almost everything. What is the bearing of D&G on the work? Well, the work has a purchase on material relations. Or does it? As boxes, cables, transmission and reception its a synaesthetic/linguistic model of the mega-network shorn of its threat to engulf us. In this sense it is something like Merleau-Ponty's aesthetics of reassurance, that for a while, it all might seem simple that we cannot but occupy nodal points in a muddled net.
What if Levinas was looking at the wrong other? "What if" comics used always engross me as a child. As an adult the fascination has moved over to the continental squad. In my episode for this week I am folding up and unfolding the question "what if Levinas chose the wrong other...". Without exploding the question of WW2, what if the priveleged other was malicious? As I understand it, in a war crimes tribunal the soldier cannot be held responsible for what the general ordered him to do. The reverse is however true, that the head of control can be punished for the body committing the act. The same is true to some extent of a corporation. Is Levinas suggesting the soldier's priveleging of his commanding other is in fact an ethical position prior to exercising critical faculty, which in this case might have meant ommission rather than commission of a malicious act? I think this cannot but be a submerged iceberg in the work of Levinas. An ethical relation with the other that comes before an ontological position could be perilous. Of course, the other that Levinas speaks of is possibly not such elastic an idea to stretch around this scenario. After all, it is just a hypothetical exercise.
What is the relationship between the problematised relation with the other and Kantian possibility and Mearleau-Ponty's reassurance found in our Nerve Meter? Almost nothing. In other words, almost everything. All of this attention is focused toward that remaining question.
posted by David O'Donoghue at 3:16 AM
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