What bugs me is lack of theory.
I was raised on theory. Good theory, I was taught, trumps messy imperfect practice.
Well, maybe I wasn’t taught this (who would do that to a child?). Maybe I invented the world of theory. A safer, more satisfying world than the one I lived in. Even so, I had help.
It is said (by Boethius who knew these things) that on Dame Philosophy’s cloak an embroidered ladder symbolizes the climb we must make from Practice at the bottom to Theory at the top. As a lad I loved this image, took it to my heart. This primed me for a college steeped in Aristotle and Aquinas. After that a career in science disappointed me (too dreary and mundane). I fell instead for the demiurgical twins Hegel and Marx who made sense of history as I lived in it.
That didn't last long. History may not have ended, but the rules that govern it are on extended leave, waiting like the rest of us to see how it comes out.
Which leaves me with....what? I’m no fan of postmodern untheory, but I do believe the world is woven from...nay, is narrative. (Does this make me a latter-day Nominalist? A long journey from the Realism of the Platonists.)
Still, something is lost here. Without theory we flail about blindly. There’s a good bit of blind flailing lately. Most of it done by those of us who don’t recognize which theories animate our actions.
I’ve come around a good bit on both sides of the question. I no longer see theory as an alternate universe of perfect forms. Neither is it the ad hoc byproduct of our schemes and projects. Theory is about action. Done right it is action.
In that sense, theory abounds. Just as action abounds. But that alone should tell us we’re in trouble. The same ideas send us racing in different directions only to butt heads because we didn’t see each other coming. We have no idea, for example, whether our best efforts will save civilization or push it over the edge.
Not to say that any of this can be resolved at the level of theory. Nor should we want it to be. The past and the present are littered with examples of (disastrous) societies dominated by one “correct” idea. Still we should be quick to falsify whatever is wrong-headed. It is just that little can be reduced to that. Besides we’ve often made huge strides under the guidance of erroneous ideas. Even if we managed to prove one theory better than others we’d have a devil of a time getting everyone to line up under its banner.
In Hermann Hesse’s novel Magister Ludi an elaborate proto-computer allows players to manipulate facts, symbols and ideas so as to generate new knowledge in the course of scoring points in a game. Leibnitz (the inventor of binary) tried to build a machine that would make discoveries. Can you say internet?
No, the internet will not yield an ultimate answer like 42. It’s strength is precisely that it is not totalizing or reductive. It is inclusive and self-correcting. It is a tool that mirrors and magnifies the light of consciousness. In this sense it is the physical body for that noosphere that Teilhard de Chardin saw mankind evolving toward. How nice that the methods and models of narratology have been lying in wait for this marvelous convergence of technology and society.
The Japanese thinker Miki Kiyoshi came in time to favor the notion that we are our tools. The medium is the message. What we create creates us. Seen in this way the internet is a form of practice that makes its own theory.
But what kind of theory? I cannot say. Only that it does not speak with an imperious or prophetic voice. It listens. It laughs. It insults and rants and offends. It excludes nothing, gives no aspect of life purchase over another. In this sense Georges Bataille would have loved it.
The boundaries between topics and idioms disappear. People tell their true stories and post them next to their attempts at literary fiction. Sometimes their personal accounts turn out to be invented and their fictions stolen. (This while educators and publishers debate the ground rules for memoirs and novels.) Intimate truths coexist with erotic fantasies. Pornographers apply the latest methods of textual criticism to discuss each other’s work.
This last may provide the most useful and portable model. Sex has moved off the axis of pleasure and reproduction to become a mode of inquiry. Not in the abstract. But not in the mere doing either. Rather, the exploration generates a reflective and analytic narrative. This happens within a virtual community and its real-world counterpart that would not otherwise exist. It may be that this aspect of on-line sexuality--instead of its conventional naughtiness and exploitation--is what really rankles pastors and politicians.
If this can happen in the bedrock of taboo, why not along the fault lines of race, class, religion, politics and ideology? This is not really a question; it is already a reality. This is quite different from being able to predict (or control) where any of this is headed. We’re already in the middle of this wild ride. All we can do is hang on tight and lean in the same direction when we have to.
But I (seem to) digress. I was talking about theory. And what I’ve come around to is a cascading chain reaction of cyber practice. Can that suffice for the ground of Being that has all but washed out from under our feet? Heraclitus would say yes. What’s more, this is a structured, constrained flux. It has rules rooted in its tools. It represents the world as number, generates endless forms out of a dialectic of ones and zeros. Yin and yang. Is and is-not. At the very heart of its operation is narrative, code.
Are were there yet? No. Except to say that we have always lived in a world of our own making. Before there were machines there were dreams. Vico said it best: We only understand what we have made.
That’s a theory I can live with.
boethius
hegel
marx
hesse
teilhard
leibnitz
miki
heraclitus
bataille
vico
I was raised on theory. Good theory, I was taught, trumps messy imperfect practice.
Well, maybe I wasn’t taught this (who would do that to a child?). Maybe I invented the world of theory. A safer, more satisfying world than the one I lived in. Even so, I had help.
It is said (by Boethius who knew these things) that on Dame Philosophy’s cloak an embroidered ladder symbolizes the climb we must make from Practice at the bottom to Theory at the top. As a lad I loved this image, took it to my heart. This primed me for a college steeped in Aristotle and Aquinas. After that a career in science disappointed me (too dreary and mundane). I fell instead for the demiurgical twins Hegel and Marx who made sense of history as I lived in it.
That didn't last long. History may not have ended, but the rules that govern it are on extended leave, waiting like the rest of us to see how it comes out.
Which leaves me with....what? I’m no fan of postmodern untheory, but I do believe the world is woven from...nay, is narrative. (Does this make me a latter-day Nominalist? A long journey from the Realism of the Platonists.)
Still, something is lost here. Without theory we flail about blindly. There’s a good bit of blind flailing lately. Most of it done by those of us who don’t recognize which theories animate our actions.
I’ve come around a good bit on both sides of the question. I no longer see theory as an alternate universe of perfect forms. Neither is it the ad hoc byproduct of our schemes and projects. Theory is about action. Done right it is action.
In that sense, theory abounds. Just as action abounds. But that alone should tell us we’re in trouble. The same ideas send us racing in different directions only to butt heads because we didn’t see each other coming. We have no idea, for example, whether our best efforts will save civilization or push it over the edge.
Not to say that any of this can be resolved at the level of theory. Nor should we want it to be. The past and the present are littered with examples of (disastrous) societies dominated by one “correct” idea. Still we should be quick to falsify whatever is wrong-headed. It is just that little can be reduced to that. Besides we’ve often made huge strides under the guidance of erroneous ideas. Even if we managed to prove one theory better than others we’d have a devil of a time getting everyone to line up under its banner.
In Hermann Hesse’s novel Magister Ludi an elaborate proto-computer allows players to manipulate facts, symbols and ideas so as to generate new knowledge in the course of scoring points in a game. Leibnitz (the inventor of binary) tried to build a machine that would make discoveries. Can you say internet?
No, the internet will not yield an ultimate answer like 42. It’s strength is precisely that it is not totalizing or reductive. It is inclusive and self-correcting. It is a tool that mirrors and magnifies the light of consciousness. In this sense it is the physical body for that noosphere that Teilhard de Chardin saw mankind evolving toward. How nice that the methods and models of narratology have been lying in wait for this marvelous convergence of technology and society.
The Japanese thinker Miki Kiyoshi came in time to favor the notion that we are our tools. The medium is the message. What we create creates us. Seen in this way the internet is a form of practice that makes its own theory.
But what kind of theory? I cannot say. Only that it does not speak with an imperious or prophetic voice. It listens. It laughs. It insults and rants and offends. It excludes nothing, gives no aspect of life purchase over another. In this sense Georges Bataille would have loved it.
The boundaries between topics and idioms disappear. People tell their true stories and post them next to their attempts at literary fiction. Sometimes their personal accounts turn out to be invented and their fictions stolen. (This while educators and publishers debate the ground rules for memoirs and novels.) Intimate truths coexist with erotic fantasies. Pornographers apply the latest methods of textual criticism to discuss each other’s work.
This last may provide the most useful and portable model. Sex has moved off the axis of pleasure and reproduction to become a mode of inquiry. Not in the abstract. But not in the mere doing either. Rather, the exploration generates a reflective and analytic narrative. This happens within a virtual community and its real-world counterpart that would not otherwise exist. It may be that this aspect of on-line sexuality--instead of its conventional naughtiness and exploitation--is what really rankles pastors and politicians.
If this can happen in the bedrock of taboo, why not along the fault lines of race, class, religion, politics and ideology? This is not really a question; it is already a reality. This is quite different from being able to predict (or control) where any of this is headed. We’re already in the middle of this wild ride. All we can do is hang on tight and lean in the same direction when we have to.
But I (seem to) digress. I was talking about theory. And what I’ve come around to is a cascading chain reaction of cyber practice. Can that suffice for the ground of Being that has all but washed out from under our feet? Heraclitus would say yes. What’s more, this is a structured, constrained flux. It has rules rooted in its tools. It represents the world as number, generates endless forms out of a dialectic of ones and zeros. Yin and yang. Is and is-not. At the very heart of its operation is narrative, code.
Are were there yet? No. Except to say that we have always lived in a world of our own making. Before there were machines there were dreams. Vico said it best: We only understand what we have made.
That’s a theory I can live with.
boethius
hegel
marx
hesse
teilhard
leibnitz
miki
heraclitus
bataille
vico
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