The Double Economy: Disjunctive Reciprocity¡ Knowledge at
its Limits¡
The
Double Economy: Introduction
I first came across these issues as a potential
problematic when a postgraduate student immersed in contemporary philosophy,
what we then called, ¡®Critical Theory¡¯, that is, in Continental Philosophy, in
Post-Structuralist as in Post-Foundationalist thought. However the direction of
my research, then and after ruled out spending any sustained period of time
thinking them through. This year the window finally arrived¡ (aided by a change
of institution and the arrival of our most recent, and apparently most disruptive,
form of plague, the advent of COVID 19).
One
thing that had always bothered me were the similarities in the divisions riding
across human knowledge, an agon of incommensurables that seemed to appear in
each and every level of human cultural activity. Apparently, no one had yet
thought to put together the relevant data from apparently disparate levels of
human practice¡ What seemed to be lacking was a theory of ¡®identity exchange¡¯
which, acting as a supplement to the notion of ¡®subjectivity¡¯ in the human
sciences, would provide the ¡®missing link¡¯ between the ¡®hard sciences¡¯ and the
realms of art and thought. The idea would be to show the parallels existing
between the different zones or levels of human culture: from our most intimate
interiority, our subjectivity as experience, through key categories in our
thought and language use, to our exteriority (the extension of our species onto
our environment, the Object of our collective Subject), particularly as found
in our arts and sciences (Deleuze might have said a concept to create a plane
of immanence - in this case a fractured concept for a fractured immanence¡ a
diremption). For any ¡®unity¡¯ could only be that of the persistent, even
irruptive, presence of an unbridgeable chasm; an invisible but ever-present
barrier operating at the heart of the human condition, constituting our very
subjectivity ¨C even defining what it is to be ¡®human¡¯.
For this w/hole is a human product: ¡®dividing¡¯ even as it
¡®unites¡¯¡
Much
of what follows will explore ¡®the self¡¯ from within, its diremptions, our blind
spots, the sense of when thinking from one point of view, we are denied the
other¡ and vice versa. The divisions of the self as we actually experience
them. The number and relationship of these parts will be one major topic. Their
incommensurability, the other. How these gaps may be bridged, in the fiction of
belief systems and in the practices of daily life will also be of concern.
However,
this study is not another version of the Romantic, ¡®murder to dissect¡¯ versus
¡®organic unity¡¯; although it must at times seem like this, very Romantic,
recognition of the diremption as the parting of the ways of religion and
science (or the increasingly distinguishable worlds of ¡®Big Subject¡¯ and ¡®Big
Object¡¯). In fact, reason and religion, had parted company a long time ago, as
attested by, what is often called, the debate between ¡®Athens and Rome¡¯. In
this later, the distinction between the individual mind, the subject of reason,
and institutional or collective force or objectivity, is already clear ¨C as are
its opponents. Romanticism may not be the last great attempt to glue together
that which has become un-fastened by Modernity, as well as what has been
existentially left un-fastened; but as a lasting influence on the present, on
our very (post) modern, Neo-romantic ideologies and repeat-performance populist
politics; its lineage and the debt owed is still clear (including an elitism
that infests ¡®modernism¡¯ far more than its adherents would wish to admit). The
historiography of a single or ¡®unified manifold¡¯, of ¡®making One¡¯, does not
begin with the Romantics (any more than does ¡®Nature First¡¯ philosophy), but
the genealogy of its urgent reassertion in the face of repeated assaults by
science (and the absence of a State guarantee or monopoly) would argue for a
continuity from then into the present.
Rather,
we ask the question: why the near pathological drive to unify that which
analysis clearly indicates is either separate or complementary (or both), and
why we do not simply distinguish the differences in question as fundamental,
constitutive, undecidable or in-eliminable? Leaving the description of the
world, including the social world or ¡®Culture¡¯, as the following of the
diremption down to its particular or local constitutive dyad or aporia and
leaving all description of the remainder as the rhetoric or genealogy or
history (or historiography) of the heroic or futile attempts at bridge building
(as with the romantic reaction mentioned above). Reminding us that all previous
religions and ideologies have been (or have succumbed to) the Quest for the
Eternal Bridge, of the yoking together of disparate elements, of different,
discrete parts, and of the resultant transfer of meaning¡ and if this transfer
is not the definition of rhetoric, of figure or of symbol, then I don¡¯t know
what is¡ Such systems and beliefs (including ¡®Natural Law¡¯ descriptions) and
the rituals that support them, are better described by the terms associated
with figurative language: the yoking together of contradictory positions for
dramatic effect, and, interestingly, the terms are many: paradox, dilemma,
conundrum, anti-theses, comparatio (also in the case
of a comparative sense with conjoining: metalepsis, chiasmus, antimetabole,
epanalepsis, resumptio, paranomasia,
agnominato, allusion, syllepsis, conceptio
¨C and other tropes of repetition). However, in this case to make meaning¡ is to
make meaning for ideological ¡®wholeness¡¯, community, identity, sanity (the act
of ¡®bringing together¡¯; the rhetoric of ritual ¨C so perhaps most apposite term
from classical rhetoric would be synoeciosis
or contrapositium, what we usually refer to as
oxymoron or the uniting of incompatibles or complementaries).
Of course, the diremption itself may be pictured in just these terms: but that
is the result of the fear of losing a comforting model of the world, the
consolation of the knowledge of ¡®First and Last¡¯ things, the assertion of
things that one cannot possibly ¡®know¡¯ and so of outraged denial, the view from
a ¡®restricted economy¡¯, the desire for the uncomfortable general view to ¡®just
go away¡¯, and finally the lack of sufficient examination of the evidence ¨C
subjective or objective¡.
Whilst
often ¡®pluming the depths¡¯ (intuition, logic, rhetoric, the means of
expression, the basic elements of experience and the basic elements of
connection making), we will also, from time to time, ¡®come up for air¡¯ to
examine aspects of the manifest practices of the diremption in our culture, the
diremption as everyday geology (what I have called ¡®the four zones¡¯, the
physical and human sciences, the arts and philosophical thought). Indeed, micro
and macro levels, the individual and social, the world in the self and the self
in other worlds, both the testament of experience and the record of cultural
institutions (dare I say, ¡®subjective¡¯ and ¡®objective¡¯¡) both are represented;
indeed, are complementary. And their relationship also is complementary in time
or (to put it another way) oscillating.
We
are all used to using an unsteady marriage of subjective and objective, (or
¡®in¡¯ and ¡®out¡¯) modes of thought; in reviews, for instance, descriptive facts
(objective) climax in evaluation (subjective). Taken further these two moments
are refined in the arts as the disciplines of Poetics, and Aesthetics¡ (still
unbridgeable and yet a divide crossed continually). For literally every
decision we make is marked by a movement between these two un-unifiable,
divided realms, we jump them, jump between them, continuously¡ With comparison
(another obvious and daily-employed example), an operation essential for the
making of rounded knowledge, to avoid narrow one-sidedness, we also must move
between ¡®in¡¯ and ¡®out¡¯; between the internal view or experience of an object,
art work, phenomena or event, and a comparison with other events or objects,
art works or art genres considered cogent, relevant¡ That is, we use both sides
of the subject/object diremption ¨C without which no broad-based knowledge (¡®who
know England, who only England know?¡¯) is possible. In the labour
of comparison, for example, we switch our point of view from one ¡®angle¡¯ to
another, from one side to another, having ¡®got inside of¡¯ both points of view
(though more precisely we might say they have got inside of us¡), then to an
external over-view of the two (although we may of course simply slide between
the two as internal points of view¡ but this also provokes comparison)¡ So we
move from ¡®in¡¯ to ¡®out¡¯, and from a subjective to an objective manner of
approach¡
This study, therefore, argues for the extended or general
diremption thesis: Is all culture marked by the diremption¡ is all culture¡ dirempt? Rhetorically I might ask: Can you imagine
something that is not at once the yoking of subject and object, or our inside
and outside, our ¡®inner¡¯ self and our ¡®outer¡¯ world of perception¡ with the
later extending into an-other (point of view) or an object (or even, with
others, an ¡®objective¡¯) point of view?
Indeed,
the model that will be suggested as most suitable for ¡®the self¡¯, or, perhaps
better, ¡®self-awareness¡¯, in its relation to the subject/object or mind/matter,
mental/material divide, needs must involve some manner of alternation or
oscillation. This model will be suggested after due consideration to the role
of contiguity and exchange (as exchange over a membrane or veil, ¡®the veil of
the other¡¯) as offering the best (¡®least faulty¡¯) description of how we
experience the world ¨C as well as how we constitute our identity. An exchange
which is also a uni-directional process, a process of
¡®disjunctive reciprocity¡¯, as consciously and unconsciously pursued in ritual;
itself a mirror of human and of all organic life as the process of
transformation of matter into body and waste¡ but also into body and mind -
which includes the ¡®cure¡¯ for individual and social entropy just as the
physical world requires repair and replacement and reproduction. This model, in
its alternation between two broad modes of being, is also the result of the
self-same experience of the ¡®twin halves¡¯ of the four zones of human culture
(also temporal, irreversible ¨C so subject, like the subject itself, to
entropy). This is the ¡®double economy¡¯, now writ large, in its functioning in
the world: as we focus now on one aspect of physics, now on that; now on one
aspect of the commodity, now on that; now on one side of decision making, now
on the other; now on art as object, and now on art as subjective reading; now
on world as object of fact (description, stasis), now as world as subject to
value judgement (agency, action, change). Now on one side (this), now on the
other (that): just as we move between present and past (and future), between
the sense of ¡®-ing¡¯, on on-going, un-finishing
experience and its others; an ever-present experience which does not allow us
to render ¡®the Eternal Present¡¯ as just another picture of recorded or ¡®-ed¡¯
experience, memory as other (which anyway is distinguished by being
¡®semi-present¡¯ in the present). The (experiencing of the) Eternal Present is
not called up from the past, nor projected forwards, but is something radically
other, radically, now, the ¡®now moment¡¯¡ but not a finished moment, rather an un-finishing
moment¡ an on-going synthesis of perception and memory which allows us to
respond rapidly to our environment. The ¡®mode of experience¡¯ in which (within
which) we call up the past, imagine the future, recognise
things and people we had previously seen (and not seen), and objects and others
we had, at some stage, learnt to call by a given name - furthermore to read
accounts of other¡¯s knowledge and experience, and pursue yet older knowledge
and history, the collective memory of our species, in books and their
technological extensions¡ the frame in which all these occur. So (we are)
always oscillating, alternating, exchanging between these two modes¡ one
present, the other co-present or semi-present. On an unending personal basis,
and in the unending process of social life and the production of knowledge, as
we now judge which description of the world is more useful, ponder how to
understand social interaction and exchange or decide what to buy, regard a
painting or play, or just reflect on what we are¡ A double oscillation
impossible to avoid¡ existence as a double ¡®action at a distance¡¯¡ an
oscillation present in the self¡ and uncannily repeated in the mirror of our
culture at large.
Within what follows a certain amount of repetition has
been necessary to offset the density of the argument, a running reminder of the
story so far, as it were; for both of which, unavoidable and very complementary
errors, I apologise in advance.
Beijing,
2020
Copyright Peter Nesteruk, 2020