Table of Contents
Master
For the master, there is no ‘tit for tat’… when we give something to the Master, we do not expect anything in return…”
Stated more simply, the implicit Master who utters each proverb does so in a lordly manner apparently immune to counterargument. But once we consider the actual verbal content of a proverb, devoid of the Master’s tacit backing, all proverbs sound equally arbitrary and stupid.
Now, it might be assumed that we can settle the issue in each case by giving “reasons” for why one proverb is more accurate than its opposite. Unfortunately, all reasons are doomed to the same fate as the initial proverbs themselves.
Miser-Spendthrift
Consider the following argument between a miser and a spendthrift.
The miser cites the proverb “a penny saved is a penny earned” while the spendthrift counters with “penny wise, pound foolish.” In an effort to resolve their dispute, they both give reasons for their preference. The miser explains patiently that in the long term, cutting needless losses actually accrues more wealth than an increase in annual income; the spendthrift objects that aggressive investment opens up more profit opportunities than does penny-pinching cost savings.
The intellectual deadlock remains, with neither able to gain ground on the other. In the next stage of the dispute, both speakers produce statistical evidence and cite various economists in defense of their views, but the evidence on both sides looks equally good and no progress is made.
In the ensuing stage, both combatants hire vast teams of researchers to support their positions with crushing reams of data.
The miser and the spendthrift are now locked into what is essentially an endless version of Shakespeare Made Easy – turning their initial proverbs into a series of ever more detailed statements, none of them directly and immediately convincing. Neither of them claims any longer to be the Master, as in the initial proverbial stage; both realize that they need to give evidence for their claims, yet both fail to establish those claims decisively. The point is not that the miser and the spendthrift are “equally correct.”
When it comes to specific questions of public policy, one of them may be far more right than the other. The point is that no literal unpacking of their claims can ever settle the argument, since each remains an arbitrary Master for as long as he attempts to call upon literal, explicit evidence .There may be an underlying true answer to the question, assuming that the dispute is properly formulated, but it can never become directly present in the form of explicit content that is inherently correct in the same way that a lightning flash is inherently bright.
Zizek
The same holds true for any dispute between philosophical theses. For example, to argue between “the ultimate reality is flux” and “the ultimate reality is the stasis beneath the apparent flux” risks stumbling into Žižek’s bottomless duel of opposing proverbs. It is true that in different historical periods one of these philosophical alternatives is generally the cutting edge while the other is the epitome of academic tedium, just as three-dimensional illusionistic painting was fresh as the dawn in Renaissance Italy but crushingly banal in Cubist Paris.
There is no reason to think that any philosophical statement has an inherently closer relationship with reality than its opposite, since reality is not made of statements. Just as Aristotle defined substance as that which can support opposite qualities at different times, there is a sense in which reality can support different truths at different times. That is to say, an absolutism of reality may be coupled with a relativism of truth. Žižek’s comical translation of Hölderlin’s poem turns out to be stupid not because the original poem is stupid, and not because the translation misunderstands Hölderlin’s advice, but because all content is inevitably stupid. And content is stupid because reality itself is not a content. But this requires further explanation. To worship the content of propositions is to become a dogmatist. The dogmatist is someone who cannot weigh the quality of thoughts or statements except by agreeing or disagreeing with them. If someone says, “materialism is true” and the dogmatist agrees, then the dogmatist salutes this person as a kindred spirit no matter how shoddy his or her reasoning, and the dogmatist equally denounces the one who says “materialism is false,” no matter how fresh and insightful the basis for this statement may be.
Kant
The dogmatist holds that truth is legible on the surface of the world, so that correct and incorrect statements–perhaps someday formalized and determinable by a machine–comprise the arena where truth is uncovered Yet this is precisely what Kant renders impossible with his split between appearances and things-in-themselves.
As Kant sees it, the problem with dogmatic philosophy is not that it believes in the things-in-themselves (so does Kant himself). Instead, the problem is that the dogmatist wishes to make the things-in-themselves accessible through discursive statements.
In this way Žižek’s assault on proverbs should be viewed as a jesting younger version of Kant’s famous antinomies, in which positive propositions about various metaphysical issues are placed side-by-side on the page and shown to be equally arbitrary. Yet the mistake made by Kant, and even more so by his German Idealist successors, is to hold that the relation of appearance to the in-itself is an all-or-nothing affair–that since the things-in-themselves can never be made present, we are either limited to discussions of the conditions of human experience (Kant) or obliged to annihilate the very notion of things-in-themselves by noting that this very notion is an accessible appearance in the mind (German Idealism).
What few have noted is that both attitudes abandon the mission of philosophia: a love of wisdom by humans who at all times both have and do not have the truth. The inability to make the things-in-themselves directly present does not forbid us from having indirect access to them. The inherent stupidity of all content does not mean the inherent impossibility of all knowledge, since knowledge need not be discursive and direct.
The absent thing-in-itself can have gravitational effects on the internal content of knowledge, just as Lovecraft can allude to the physical form of Cthulhu even while cancelling the literal terms of the description.
McLuhan
Instead of representational realism, Lovecraft works in the idiom of a weird realism that inspired the title of this book. In more recent times, the Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan is the little acknowledged master of rhetoric and the secrets it conceals from literal visibility. This always happens through some background medium: for McLuhan, all arguments over the good and bad content of television programs miss the fact that the medium of television itself alters our behavior and lifestyle irrespective of what content it depicts. This is why for McLuhan “the medium is the message,” whereas the usual assumption is that “the content is the message.” This view takes on its most extreme form in McLuhan’s infamous statement that “the content or message of any particular medium has about as much importance as the stenciling on the casing of an atomic bomb.”21 In important late work conducted jointly with his son Eric,22 McLuhan frames this idea in terms of the classical Trivium, as a defense of rhetoric and grammar as opposed to the dialectic of explicit surface content. While the dogmatist is a dialectician in this classical sense, the artist and the lover of wisdom are rhetoricians. This is not from some devious desire to seduce the unwary, but from recognition that the background is where the action is.
Source: Weird Realism: Graham Harman