30 September 2007

"Spirit is essentially the result of its own activity. Its activity is transcending the immediately given, negating it, and returning into itself."

"The life of the ever-present Spirit is a cycle of stages, which, on the one hand, co-exist side by side, but, on the other hand, seem to be past. The moments which Spirit seems to have left behind, it still possesses in the depth of its present."

--Hegel, Reason in History

Hartman writes of Hegel's mutual relations amongst Idea, Nature, and Spirit roughly as: the science of Idea is Logic, its structure is Dialectic; the science of Nature is Geometry, its structure is Space-Time; and the science of Spirit is History, its structure is Time (ibid). Indeed, Hegel wrote of past and presence in an 'ever-present' in which the Historical Spirit is in a constant thoughtful mediation with contemporary time.

In many ways, I posit the role and function of Spirit as a heuristic for Reason and its stigma from the Enlightenment to Modernity and Postmodernity. Postmodernism, rather than "the combination of narcissim and nihilism" as Gore defines it, is a reassessment of Reason's place in our current virtual-reality/real-virtuality that I identify as embedded in the sphere of hyphenation. Postmodernism can then be seen as a perspectival framework of critical analysis to re-evaluate the accepted doxa of what is Modernism, science, and the progress of Reason. It effectively goads us to re-evaluate Reason, Truth, progress, science, and objectivity to catalyze a more sophisticated and comprehensive approach to those concepts and deliver a more plausible reality heuristic. Although it may be helpful to replace objectivity with plausability as Novick suggests (That Noble Dream), I do not think it necessary to do away with altogether.

There is still an objectivity to be derived from Reason proper - the potentiality of Reason - that is not as necessary for History and historiography as it is for a new hermeneutics of our Present. And this hermeneutics is what I necessarily identify through hyphenation as a much needed and more accurate vernacular - the continuation of the linguistic turn and perhaps a new ontological linguistic framework to structure this turn. Nietzsche identified such a need - to debunk the semiotics of his time and the legacy of Socrates' reason=virtue=happiness equation - all of which he reduced to dialectical buffoonery (Twilight of the Gods). He was quite 'on' when he stood History on its head by declaring it a falsehood, and opposed sense to reason and the apparent to the real: "with the real world we have also abolished the apparent world".

But I am getting ahead of myself.

To be honest to Postmodernism and explain how it is of present critical relevance, I must necessarily discuss its precursors: the Enlightenment and Modernism. As a proponent of the Enlightenment, de Condorcet described the movement as seeking to maximize the wealth and well-being - Progress - of society through a systematic application of science and technology, thus liberating the individual from the shackles of ignorance, deprivation, and tyranny (Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind). I generally understand the Enlightenment as the Great Light of Reason where Truth through Reason takes center stage. Of course, critics disagree.

Critics of the Enlightenment contend that by seeking to abolish myth, it created new myths in its place - the myth of science, technology, and quantitative analysis - to control nature and man thus burying us further into the false. Marxists roughly argued that behind the universal human rights of the Enlightenment lay a hierarchical social, economic, and political order based on property and the reduction of (human) value into commodification and use in exchange. Furthermore, the Enlightenment’s elevation of science came under attack as a questionable reflection of an objective reality and was thus reduced to a historically and culturally conditioned discourse (Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions).

Modernization, World War I and II, and the rise of the machine, dominance of industrialization, and oppression of technology. In a word - Progress - and with it the concepts of an erstwhile extolled freedom, equality, and age of reason that shackled any hope of ideology into submission of praxis. As Fukuyama explains it, modernization was overly optimistic in viewing the modern world as the "end of history" replacing it instead with a truth that "does not exist" and a world where "the real is as imagined as the imaginary" (The End of History and the Last Man). In this manner, Postmodernism is a substantial warning against utopianism and idealized conceptions of Progress.

To conceive of Postmodernism as a linear construct definitively marking an end to and crisply breaking with Modernism would be a gross misconception. Rather, there is such a fluid overflow between Modernism and Postmodernism that we can not send our farewells to the former so resolutely and concretely with any level of accuracy. Indeed, media, migration, and the work of the imagination serve to catalyze multiple modernities within the overlapping context of postmodern globalization.

As Appadurai aptly states, "We cannot simplify matters by imagining that the global is to space what the modern is to time.[…] The megarhetoric of developmental modernization…in many countries is still with us. But it is often punctuated, interrogated, and domesticated by the micronarratives of film, television, music, and other expressive forms, which allow modernity to be rewritten more as vernacular globalization and less as a concession to large-scale national and international policies" (Modernity At Large). For him, we have not done away with our myths: "In the migration of our words, we see the victory of our myths" and through our imagination, we have developed the phenomena of "nostalgia for the present" that is a "nostalgia without memory" (ibid). Indeed, myths and the imagination are not only relevant, but also critically necessary.

Furthermore, in what seems to be a return to ideology over praxis through the imagined, Appadurai identifies "five dimensions of global cultural flows that can be termed (a) ethnoscapes, (b) mediascapes, (c) technoscapes, (d) financescapes, and (e) ideoscapes" that are "deeply perspectival constructs, inflected by the historical, linguistic, and political situatedness of…nation-states, multinationals, diasporic communities…subnational groupings and movements…and even intimate face-to-face groups, such as villages, neighborhoods, and families" (ibid). For him, these scapes are building blocks of imagined worlds that are "multiple worlds…constituted by the historically situated imaginations of persons and groups spread around the globe…many persons…live in such imagined worlds…to contest and…subvert the imagined worlds of the official mind and of the entrepreneurial mentality that surround them" (ibid).

So with the imagined, the virtual is a reality more real than the agreed doxa. Fluidity indeed!

Precisely as a reaction to Nicholas Handler's essay, "The Posteverything Generation," published in The New York Times Magazine on 30 September 2007. In it, Handler responds to the stigma of the Postmodern generation and especially to Gore's mis-labeling of Postmodernism as "the combination of narcissism and nihilism":

"We live our lives in masks and speak our minds in a dead language - the language of a society that expects us to agitate because that's what young people do."

In response to this expectation of revolution where the "words from another era...do not reflect the realities of today," he answers that his generation is "writing a revolution" in their "own words".

Through his essay, Handler serves a twofold purpose then:

1) He identifies a new type of revolution - the electronic revolution - created in the virtual public sphere mediated through technology and with far greater potence.

(This is the electronic civil disobedience of the smart mob (Rheingold), B92, N30, N5M, ®™ark, CAE, EDT, AdBusters, McSpotlight, London Greenpeace, that are effectively changing society in a smarter, more sophisticated manner and without carnage.)

2) He acknowledges the obsolete language that remains in use for his generation to de-utilize, explaining his generation's current re-writing of a new more relevant language.

(And this is exactly why I constructed hyphenation.)

Hyphenation is partly a continuation of hermeneutics, but rather than a hermeneutics of text, hyphenation is one of multiple co-existing virtual-realities and real-virtualities. It is a re-evaluation of the dualities of virtual and real, ideology and praxis, imagined and material, and of limitations and transcendence. It is a return to creative potentiality and the continuation/fruition of positive and effective progress through that actualized potentiality.

Much like Schelling's constructed line striving in infinity towards the (elusive or never attained) objective subject-object, the hyphen is the symbol for the pregnant potential of idea for praxis, the imgined for the actualized real, and the infinity of creativity proper. Hyphenation is thus, a very necessary ontological construct because of its relevance and call to a more comprehensive accuracy...an accuracy that is the most apt to capture both the virtual and the real and encode it into everyday vernacular.

To invoke one of Hegel's figures of recognition: Annerkenung before Erkenung!