Dasein is hard to get at, as we learn in §5 of Being and Time.
True, Dasein is ontically not only what is near or even nearest – we ourselves are it, each of us. Nevertheless, or precisely for this reason, it is ontologically what is farthest removed. / Das Dasein ist zwar ontisch nicht nur nahe oder gar das nächste -- wir sind es sogar je selbst. Trotzdem oder gerade deshalb ist es ontologisch das Fernste.
What accounts for this inability to see what is nearest?
It is helpful, if also a bit unnerving, when media culture generates near proofs, direct materializations, of theses that you've already been walking around feeling smugly smart about. The thesis that I'm thinking about right now isn't exactly mine, but it is one that has held my attention for a little while now. And I think I can localize the origin of this line of thought down to a single passage from William Gibson's Pattern Recognition, a passage that clues us in to the significance of the novel's title.
"Of course," he says, "we have no idea, now, of who or what the inhabitants of our future might be. In that sense, we have no future. Not in the sense that our grandparents had a future, or thought they did. Fully imagined cultural futures were the luxury of another day, one in which 'now' was of some greater duration. For us, of course, things can change so abruptly, so violently, so profoundly, that futures like our grandparents' have insufficient 'now' to stand on. We have no future because our present is too volatile. ... We have only risk management. The spinning of the given moment's scenarios. Pattern recognition." (Clipped from here)
It is an argument about science fiction that is also an argument about the experience of time at present, or vice versa. And it is in an excellent description of the state of speculative films today. In one of the DVD extras for Children of Men (unfortunately not available on line) the set-designers and stylists discuss the fact that Cuaron wanted everything in the film to look like stuff from today, only older and more weathered, which is exactly what we get. The future as present-less-infrastructural investment. Disaster movies set themselves in a next year that looks a lot like last year, while Al Gore's apocalyptic infomercial confusedly quivers between easy futural solutions (buy carbon indulgences!) and a deeper, more convincing sense that we are always already fucked.
Newsmagazine features on future stuff has morphed into special issues on What Is About to Happen, and What Are They Doing to Stop It. From this...
to this...
(Survival Guide???? See what I mean...)
What set me to writing this post (the "near proof" mentioned above) was the trailer for a new PKD film-adaptation, reportedly quite terrible: Next.
A PKD symptomatic in with the protagonist can only see into the proximate future - a future that apparently climaxes with the detonation (or do they stop it???) of a nuclear device in an American shipyard. Right. It is tough to think of a premise that comes closer to exactly mimesis of the dominant temporal strategy of the first four years of the Bush administration, which I was only half-gulible enough to half-take serious, as I anxiously sort-of awaited the truck bombing of the synagogue and the two cop cars constantly parked in front of it at the end of my street in Brooklyn.
The progression of PKD films over the past quarter-century is vividly emblematic of the recision of the future; with each iteration, we draw closer to the present, and even drop at times back into the past. First, there's Blade Runner, with its replicants and super-huge video screens and so forth, even if things are dusty and noirish. Then there's Total Recall with the robot drivers and Mars Today and tennis sim that Sharon Stone practices with. But A Scanner Darkly is a retro future, set in a Californicated past of stoners and beautiful losers, no matter where (when) it thinks it is. (I know I'm leaving a few out, but bear with me....) And then there's Here.
When I teach utopian / dystopian fiction from the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries to my undergraduates, I usually start by taking them on a little mental journey back to a time when the question future was actually up for argument, and then bring them back to the here and now to ask them what, if anything, they can imagine significantly changing during the course of their lives. More and better video games, older and older people, fewer and fewer good jobs. But, of course, no fundamental alteration in the political or culture organization of things - their kids, if they have them, will live in the same sort of world as they do. Maybe someone will cure cancer, perhaps there will be free tv on the internets, but mostly things will rest as they are.
The first time I used this ploy, I actually waited to hear what they thought the future might look like. I have since learned to lecture straight through the socratic counter-point. They don't answer; they've never, it turns out, even considered the question - at least the vocal ones haven't. It is all entirely new to them...
It is tough, though, to know exactly what to make of this development - the foreshortening of the future from way, way out there to quite soon to almost now down toward in selben Augenblick. On the one hand, of course, it marks a foreclosure of the concept that the world might be radically otherwise, as there will never be any time for it to radically change. On the other hand, the whole scenario calls to mind Benjamin's "Theses on the Philosophy of History" and its resistance to the Social Democratic concept of progress as a "progression through a homogenous, empty time" in favor of a "notion of a present which is not a transition, but in which time stands still and has come to a stop."
At any rate, perhaps this sort of issue is exactly the sort of thing that the present day literature department should take up as a task. We English professors love the conjunction of the aesthetic and the political. But something has happened that makes it nearly impossible (save through pseudo-blog) to make this argument publically.
Even the categories of male and female are distinguished according to the same dualism by Aristotle, all the higher, form-giving categories being equated with the male -- as was only too evident in a patriarchal society -- and the merely material and existent with the female. No doubt you will have endured a learned school-teacher telling you that the roots of mater and materia are related, and you will recall the ensuing howl of triumph -- that, too, is an echo from Aristotle's Metaphysics. (p. 78)
I never endured learning this from a learned school-teacher. The devolution of philosophy in our lives is measured by the progressive disappearance of even philosophic pedantry and charlatanism.
Like everyone else I have been doing my best to avoid blogging about the horrific murders. I've been tempted any number of times. But when I saw the following comment, I knew I could resist no longer.
(UPDATE: Sorry - should have explained what exactly this is for readers lucky enough not to live with (rather slim) possibility that the likes of this guy will soon be your head of state... From NPR:
Republican presidential contender Sen. John McCain (AZ) joked about bombing Iran this week during a campaign appearance in Murrells Inlet, S.C.
McCain was asked by an audience member about possible U.S. military action in Iran.
"How many times do we have to prove that these people are blowing up people now, never mind if they get a nuclear weapon. When do we send them an airmail message to Tehran?" a man in the crowd asked.
In response, McCain said, "That old, eh, that old Beach Boys song, Bomb Iran" — which elicited laughter from the crowd. McCain then chuckled before briefly singing — to the tune of the chorus of the Beach Boys' classic "Barbara Ann" — "Bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, anyway, ah ...."
Feminism is the new spam mail, offering you the latest deals in lifestyle improvement, from the bedroom to the boardroom, from guilt-free fucking to the innocent hop-skip all the way to the shopping mall - I don't diet so it's ok! I'm not deluded! I can buy what I like!
Feminism TM is the perfect accompaniment to femme-capital TM: Politics, such as it isn't, belongs to the well-balanced individual (the happy shopper), sassiness is like, so where it's at (consumer confidence) and, most of all, one must never, ever admit to cracks in the facade (oh, you know, ideology). This foundation is flawless! And it lasts all night! Unlike men, titter, titter, etc. etc. Capitalism makes a better lover than any guy - it's full of shoes, and Sex in the City DVDs and gossip mags and, like, now we've proved that eating chocolate is more exciting than kissing...but didn't we know that all along, girls?...The world is ours for the taking...just let me finish this packet of Maltesers first...
Section 4 of the Introduction to Being and Time contains a lot of preliminary characterizations of Da-sein that will be filled out later.
First Heidegger links up the terminology of Da-sein to human being. "As ways in which human beings behave, sciences have this being's (the human being's) kind of being. We are defining this being terminologically as Da-sein. / Wissenschaften haben als Verhaltungen des Menschen die Seinsart dieses Seienden (Mensch). Dieses Seiende fassen wir terminologisch als Dasein"
Yesterday evening I set out to find images of a department store I went to as a kid, thinking that its logo, a yellow, orange, and brown rainbow pitched to the side, might fit some ancient neural lock and open mnemonic pathways of forgotten consumer desire, of the misplaced and perverse and basically theological awe with which I regarded the store, under whose sepia arc were gathered the objects that summarized and held prisoner my wishes.
There's a lazy tendency to slander the past when something happens in the present. In today's New York Times David Carr writes that the firing of Don Imus for his racist remarks is a "sign of the times."
Mr. Imus is an old-school radio guy caught in a very modern media paradigm. When
he started 30 years ago, if he made the same kind of remark, it would have
floated off into the ether — the Federal
Communications Commission, if it received complaints, might have taken
notice, but few others.
Yesterday, Tuesday April 10, I saw an article by Mr. Joseph Kahn at the New York Times on China's mistreatment of one of its intellectuals. If you read the Times, you've read the same article about a hundred times before. They love writing articles about evil foreign regimes while luxuriating in the pink bubble bath background assumption that "we" aren't anything like that. And thus Kahn was more than willing, when referring to China's treatment of its reformist intellectuals, to use a word that has become, recently, "contested": torture. Earlier this year, in January, I contacted another Times reporter, Mr. Scott Shane, who was unwilling to use the 'T' word in an unqualified way concerning our treatment of detainees at Guantanomo. The contrast between these two uses of the word 'torture' is what prompted me to contact both authors.
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