this
morning, preparing a lecture on Walter Benjamin's theses On the Concept of History I found myself considering
the difficulty of reconciling phenomenological and social ways of
conceiving time (memory / history:: mortality / the redeemed world).
Yesterday I made slides comparing Marx's M-C-M' to Shannon and Weaver's
communication model. It struck me a way to think this would be to
supplement the critic's question (can I know what you're saying?) with
the artist's question (can I tell you anything?) - and if Shannon and
Weaver are right and senders and receivers are commensurable because
they already share a medium/channel, then the artist's question is also
'can I tell you anything you don't already know? At this pint the
questions of silence and invisibility come centre-stage. For
ecocriticism, there has to be some mode of communion (though not
communication, not, certainly, in the mathematical model) bonding humans
together, and humans with the world. Though the biochemistry of life
means we are already mediated by and mediating the world, in the past
I've argued that technology - the mediating role of all technologies
between world and humans – can become our route royal to reversing the
alienation of humans from the world. The three horsemen of the
contemporary apocalypse, pandemic, climate and economy, and their
brother the kleptocratic class, may not support that hypothesis. They
are not 'significant' in any ordinary sense: they don't make sense, they
don't use signs that we can understand, and they are fatal. This mixes
up the ancient distinction between the mortal individual and the social
as the source of hope. Now we face mortality as a social event. The
temptation to acedia, Benjamin's word for fatalist descent into
melancholy contemplation, has rarely seemed to tempting, not since
'midnight in the century' that preceded this one.
I have set myself to read Dussell when teaching finishes.
For now however, as a working title, Silence and Invisibility
