“UNLESS YOU’VE been hiding under a rock, you know that saying things about rocks is now something humanists are allowing themselves to do with increasing frequency. After 60 or so years of talking about how you can’t talk (directly) about reality, only about how to access (or indeed how to access how to access) reality, humanities scholars are talking about rocks, and not just (human) representations of rocks either. Indeed, you might find some of them talking about rocks’ representations of humans.” --read on
5 comments:
Great essay! Only thing I might say is that, as an artist, I'm not sure I'm as interested in messing around with cause and effect. Perhaps occupying some more nebulous confrontation with/between appearance and reality, science and the humanities?
so you're saying that tho we consider the ding-an-sich to be unknowable and therefore effectively non-existent, the mere possibility of its existence forces us to consider what its nature might be. Stepping out on this path logic's ex contradictiones quodlibet' (out of contradiction anything may emerge) lurks everywhere, and so our primary task is to slay the myriad useless concepts that will emerge, but still keep open eyes for the miraculous that is also possible.
One of the things I get from SR is that artists just DO mess around with cause & effect; the part that's a choice is how you do it. This then becomes a model for everyone besides artists, maybe....or maybe we're all artists already.
I'm pretty sure that "unknowable" and "nonexistent (effectively or otherwise)" are not at all in the same category, and that's the main point. Therefore concepts (useless or otherwise) are also miracles.
Great review, and one that answers a lot of questions I've been pondering lately. Now I really have to finish reading Descola so I can get to Shaviro!
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