Sorglose Nacht

Leo Strauss was first brought to my attention by Carl Mitcham back in 2004, by way of Harvey Mansfield’s insidious A Student’s Guide to Political Philosophy. Since this time, one of two things has happened: One, a lot of people had Strauss brought to their attention, or two, I noticed a lot more people paying attention to Strauss. At least, paying attention to some people in the Bush administration who have been labeled Straussians, or labeled themselves as such. (Incidentally, it seems that even the most Straussian of the cabinet/PNAC Straussians may want to re-identify, in their interesting public stance on the “War on Terror”, as Mansfieldian, which is at least terra firma.)

Apparently, 2007 is the year where another group of Strauss apologists (this is starting to become somewhat of an American philosophical tradition, isn’t it?) take Strauss back, so to speak. Which has, I have to admit, sort of caught me off guard. Books have been released this year on Strauss and Arendt and, perhaps even more bizarrely, on Strauss and Levinas.

It’s not usually in my interests, nor is it in the interest of the way that I see the blog as a way of abetting philosophical discourse, to be topical. But I am nonetheless a citizen of this information glut, and from time to time, something like this is going to catch my eye.

I’d like to frame my piece on the late-blooming “was Strauss really not as politically-charged as the world seems to interpret him as?” discussion in terms of a piece of Derrida, this time interviewed for the Journal of Nietzsche Studies (vol. 7) in 1994. Here it is:

Thinking’s task today is to tackle, to measure itself against, everything making up this programme of contamination. This programme forms the history of metaphysics, it informs the whole history of political determination, of politics as it was constituted in Ancient Greece, disseminated throughout the West and finally exported to the East and South. If the political isn’t thought in this radical sense, political responsibility will disappear. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that this thought has become necessary only today; rather, today more than ever, one must think this machine in order to prepare for a political decision, if there is such a thing, within this contamination.

Methodologically, Strauss’ strategy (and here is the seed of his charged “noble lies”/”deadly truths” agenda) for interpreting the classics, and Plato in particular, is couched in the notion of philosophical texts offering both an exoteric teaching and an esoteric/”true”/privileged teaching, which was concealed from the general reader. Let’s look at the text:

Philosophers or scientists who hold this view about the relations of philosophy or science and society are driven to employ a peculiar manner of writing which would enable them to reveal what they regard as the truth to the few, without endangering the unqualified commitment of the many to the opinions on which society rests. They will distinguish between the true teaching as the esoteric teaching and the socially useful teaching as the exoteric teaching; whereas the exoteric teaching is meant to be easily accessible to every reader, the esoteric teaching discloses itself only to the very careful and well-trained readers after long and careful study.

So here’s the aporia that we can lens using the Derrida interview quoted above:

1. “On each occasion one will have to make complex gestures to explain that one is acting, despite contamination, in this particular way, because one believes that it is better to do this rather than that, that a particular act chosen is in such and such a situation more likely to do such and such than another possible act. These gestures are anything but pragmatic, they are strategic evaluations which attempt to measure up to the formalization of the machine.”
2. “There’s no way out…one has indeed to assume the risk of being misunderstood, continuing to think in modest terms what is after all exceedingly ambitious, in order to prepare for these responsibilities - if they exist.”

Which is to say that the way in which Strauss is styled or framed by his partisan (or non-partisan) successors, now or to come, is both entirely his fault, and was entirely unavoidable. That is, Strauss either chose an Heideggerian gesture of silence, or else paid a Nietzschean price for esotericism. And here is the point: these two strategies operate in the same register; or, in the same contaminated machine of global politics.

What Strauss fundamentally failed to do (and that which he could not fail to do) was to appropriately, “think this machine in order to prepare for a political decision, if there is such a thing, within this contamination.” Any topical political silence in which he indulged - be it in the shameful Heideggerian order or the esoteric Nietzschean order - was nothing more than a failure on his part to anticipate the “absolutely unprecedented responsibilities of ‘thought’ and ‘action’…” (Derrida, Of Spirit) inherent within his textual gesture.

This gesture of silence, this self-insistence on esoteric meaning is what allows Strauss to be continually refigured next to Levinas, Arendt, and Nietzsche, as well as Wolfowitz and the American neo-conservatives. This aristocratic gesture, narcissistic bait, inevitably failed appeal to deceleration in a obviously accelerating world…

But of course, what we are calling the Heideggerian and Nietzschean orders here doubtlessly contaminate each other … … …

I was browsing Netlex today, and I came across the work of Mark Lombardi, which is paper drawings visualizing the networks of relationships between all the players in, for example, the The BCCI Affair.

Now if this sounds familiar to denizens of the network art community, it is no surprise - Josh On’s “They Rule” has been a staple example of the data-visualization era of multimedia work since it first arrived on the scene in the early part of this decade. If you haven’t spent some time map-making on this site, I strongly recommend you do so right away. The difference here, of course, is the difference between a map and a cartographic technology.

Not too long ago, I was visiting my friend Rick Silva in Boulder, and he pointed me in the direction of the work of Lee Walton, who seems to be working the border of whatever it is that the network can do for visual art, and a more flatland style of data visualization. (I recommend immensely looking through some of his baseball drawings.)

I guess the point here is that while it seems like data visualization might seem like a dead-end anymore, there are still great things happening with it. Particularly with the institution of the ability to create data-visualization tools for wide public use, as well as the technology of “stem” or RAW data, the possibilities have become more interesting. In short, data visualization is a framework for creating pictures, “interactive” or otherwise, and there is nothing like looking at some pictures on a Saturday morning.

Except perhaps reading some Heidegger on a Saturday morning:

It remains true, nonetheless, that man in the technological age is, in a particularly striking way, challenged forth into revealing. That revealing concerns nature, above all, as the chief storehouse of the standing energy reserve. Accordingly, man’s ordering attitude and behavior display themselves first in the rise of modern physics as an exact science. Modern science’s way of representing pursues and entraps nature as a calculable coherence of forces. Modern physics is not experimental physics because it applies apparatus to the questioning of nature. Rather the reverse is true. Because physics, indeed already as pure theory, sets nature up to exhibit itself as a coherence of forces calculable in advance, it therefore orders its experiments precisely for the purpose of asking whether and how nature reports itself when set up in this way.
-From The Question Concerning Technology (my italics)

Now the interesting question of the Gestell becomes a bit more blurry as it has clearly never been the exclusive province of science, but it has also never been more concrete that it is also precisely the movement of the “beaux arts.” And of course, this is the very solicitation of the above notion of the Gestell, which is to say (rather obviously) that the dis-ordering of the order of the enframing of the world is itself also the enframing of the world. Curiously, Gestell is also the name for a skeleton.

Lee Walton: Market Street Observations, #4, 2002 (detail)

It is always a fine moment when I pop down Clay Shirky’s newest addition to his Networks, Economics & Culture mailing list, and the newest edition is no exception. Titled Ontology is Overrated: Categories, Links, and Tags, it takes a well-balanced look at two organization systems that have existed for the web, one of which Shirky refers to as “ontological”, the other “organic.”

As it is clearly not Mr. Shirky’s intention to deal in any depth with what the “is” is, I thought a look at this document in terms of a more wide-scope “philosophical ontology” might yield something interesting, at least terminologically-speaking. To begin, let me show you how he delimits the term ontology:

The main thread of ontology in the philosophical sense is the study of entities and their relations … What kinds of things exist or can exist in the world, and what manner of relations can those things have to each other? … The knowledge management and AI communities have a related definition … something like “an explicit specification of a conceptualization.” … The common thread between the two definitions is essence, “Is-ness.” In a particular domain, what kinds of things can we say exist in that domain, and how can we say those things relate to each other?

Using this working-style definition, he proceeds to give some examples of “real-world” ontological classification systems: the periodic table of the elements, the Dewey Decimal System, and finally the DMOZ/Yahoo post-library heirarchy. It is interesting and funny, well worth a read for anyone interested in organization systems in general. After witnessing in pictures the transformation between the rigid heirarchy of the DDS and a graph that represents something like the “ontologically” unstructured reference map of Google, he goes through the del.icio.us system of classification by aggregation of user-”tagged” references, finally suggesting and for the most part convincingly showing that a combinatorial system of user-input works better than a dictatorially controlled “ontology” for a large unstable set of data accessed by a great many non-expert users, such as the web.

Ok. Now, the question I am asking myself is this: Ignoring unproductive definitional quips, and simply accepting Shirky’s last question for ontology, that is, “what kinds of things can we say exist in [this] domain, and how can we say those things relate to each other?,” to what extent is del.icio.us (un-)ontological?

Now, clearly, taking the scope of the question above as the entire scope of what Shirky names “ontology,” del.icio.us is nothing less than entirely ontological. It is a way in which someone, Joshua Shachter, answers the question “what kinds of things exist and how can we say these things relate to each other?” It is, to be sure, a distributed ontology, and our point as follows will be in general that ontology is already “distributed” in the first place.

Contemporary ontology is always an engagement with Heidegger. What is at stake in this particular case is the feasibility of Heidegger’s “authentic” and “inauthentic” Dasein. The “inauthentic” Dasein is the mode of being in which Dasein finds itself engaged (immersed) in the so-called “idle talk” (das Gerede) of the “they” (das Man) while in the “authentic” mode (eigentlich^*) Dasein hearkens to the call of and is individualized by its own uncanniness (cf. ¶40, 235/191). In an unsympathetic - or careless, or incomplete - reading of Heidegger, it is easy to allow oneself to read this as a sort of übermensch ontology - again in the popular and not properly Nietzschean sense - which would itself allow room for something like a fascist ontology (a danger one always skirts with Heidegger). Meanwhile, and in a seemingly contrary way, Heidegger had already explicity suggested the following: Being-in-the-world, that is, Being-in-the-world-with- others-in-the-world is the “basic state of Dasein by which every mode of its Being gets co-determined.” (¶26, 153/117)

Or, that the determination of Being is already co-determined. Given this, it becomes increasingly difficult to understand why access to Being, that which is most properly at play in existence, would be in the provice of an authentic understanding, that is, in a severing of Dasein from what has already been established as its co-constitutive condition of determination (it’s “I”) by its others in the first place. In other words, since “ontical experience takes place right at the ‘they,’ and nowhere else.” And as the ontological is nothing but the logic of the ontic inside the ontic, we can only frame the determinitive origin of the practice of ontology right at the “they” - better: “Moreover, there is no ‘elsewhere’: that is the ‘meaning of Being,’ …” (Jean Luc-Nancy, The Decision of Existence)

Or, again, ontology (the logic of existence) has already never been the province of some God-like categorizer, but has always indeed taken place right at the absolutely inescapable distribution of existence. I won’t, but I think you can basically find this thread in not only Heidegger and Nancy, but also Aristotle’s Metaphysics, and, as Heidegger himself displays, in the pre-Socratics as well. In another form, Richard Rorty and the American pragmatists say something just like this, albeit in a less strong sense.

As such, we might say that with something like del.icio.us, we can finally think the practice of categorization as properly ontological.

^* It has been suggested that “ownness” would be a more fair translation, inasmuch as the existential analytic specifically excludes something like a purity of origin or provenance, which the English “authentic” implies. So “authentic Dasein” is perhaps more properly thought as “Dasein in its ownness”. For what it’s worth.

Pitchforkmedia, bastion of flowery independent music reviews, has posted a feature by comedian David Cross (of Mr. Show with Bob and David fame) entitled Albums to Listen to While Reading Overwrought Pitchfork Reviews. It’s funny, and besides picking on Pitchfork for their sometimes elaborate-to-the-point-of-nonsensical reviews, it diagnoses a symptom that has seemingly become endemic to the serious independent music scene, a kind of impossible completist syndrome that has given way to the oft-heard accusation of “music snobbery.”

May I suggest listening to Until it Happens/You Let it Happen, by Maximum Minimum. The fourth album (not counting the re-release of the first three 7-inches on HugTown Records) reaffirms the band’s status as the godfathers of the Taos, N.M. “crying scene.” Like a gilded phoenix rising from the toxic ashes of the death of mercurial lead guitarist, Peter Chernin, Maximum Minimum snarls back like a taunted tiger on steroids (also on acid).

There is something definitively psychological about this kind of completist syndrome in music. In this article, it is suggested that completism stems (perhaps originally) from a “part of the nature of improvisation that breeds the completist in us,” vis à vis jazz. Sumera seems to think that it stops there, though: “There are not too many pop completists out there. The ephemerality of the music cannot sustain the interest of the completist syndrome.” As it were, the Pitchfork scene and your friends deftly testify to the mistakenness of this.

The completist urge is doubtless a radicalization of the simple collector’s urge. It’s not enough (though it is great) to keep listening to Dusk at Cubist Castle when Mississippi Luau exists too. And thousands more. Doubtless, one tries to hold together the indefinite and constantly surging history of a genre, a style, an artist - one thinks these things historiologically. A touching example of this completist phenomenon is the fabulous John Darnielle of Mountain Goats fame. But why? Why is enough never enough?

Humor and philosophy are all tied up. Things that we know are true and scare us make us laugh. Sometimes it’s the only reaction that can save us.

It’s no mistake that Heidegger makes his most substantial mention of Nietzsche in Sein und Zeit under the heading of historicality (See: Mcquarrie translation, Part II Section 5, ¶76, 448-49/396-97.)

The beginning of his [Nietzsche’s] ’study’ [On the Use and Abuse of History] allows us to suppose that he understood more than he has made known to us.
…
But the ground on which authentic historiology is founded is temporality as the existential meaning of the Being of care.

That is, our discourse on history is grounded in our existential temporality, being futural, being-toward-death. And indeed, according to Heidegger, on the anxiety that would paralyze us in the face of a death which is each time ours alone. In the face of this anxiety, the state of what Heidegger calls “inauthentic” Dasein is something akin to the frantic forgetting of its futural being, a plunge eyes closed into the quiet waters of Das Man: the world of measure - clocks, calendars, investment, record collecting. And with David Cross, we laugh at the extensivity with which this plays itself out. As Camus once quipped, “When one has no character one has to apply a method.”

Meanwhile, 1892, Turin. Nietzsche, in the early throes of paralysis progressiva, (he was paralyzed for the last 11 years of his life - during the last seven he could not speak) only repeated phrases: “I am dead because I am stupid,” or else simply “in short, dead.” During those last seven years, eyes wide open, he perhaps lived death as few have - a model of courage for Heidegger’s “authentic” Dasein - registered a silent laugh at the very thing from which we distract ourselves until we are overtaken with it, eyes wide open.

In one of his last meaningful correspondences in 1889, a letter to Peter Gast (a composer who moved to Basel in 1875 to study under Nietzsche and Franz Overbeck and Nietzsche’s “editor” and proofreader in 1876) he wrote:

To my maëstro Pietro:
Sing me a new song: The world is transfigured and all
the heavens are full of joy.

The Crucified