Dialectical Adventures: Partying with the “Spirit”

Rachel going as Lady "Pazzi"

Dialectical Adventures: Partying with the “Spirit”

by Creston Davis

Have you ever had one of those nights that felt more like a dream than reality? Recently while doing work on a book in New York I was invited to one of those “secret-theme” parties in which people dress up in different time-period costumes and put on a persona of a famous writer or artist. But the trick here is to pick someone out who’s known but not immediately familiar, because if someone guesses who you are you have to leave the party (or at least join the parallel party when your secret identity is blown). After my friends and I frantically hit as many vintage shops in Chelsea as we could (FYI, there are no real vintage shops on the Upper-East Side), I had to think of what person I should “be.” I finally narrowed the list down to either Antonin Artaud or Rene Crevel (a French surrealist and writer). I went as the latter about who Dali said that he was “The only real communist within the surrealist [movement].”

Here the lesson is simple– to be successful you must find a dialectical balance between someone who people know, but don’t want them to immediately recognize.  This is the basic start of the dialectical adventure!

The standard critique that you often find when it comes to media studies is a simple cause (the media bombard us with images, perverse representations of reality etc.) and the effect (we believe or “buy” these images) and so, the end result is: the media basically determine how we interpret the world. But this gap between cause (media) and the effect (the world) is itself a distortion. To think that images and reality are somehow separated it precisely where the problem is. For Kant to Husserl, the object of perception couldn’t be know in-itself (that is, its essence was unknowable). This was why Jacobi charged Kant’s system as being nihilistic.

But here it is important that we see how Hegel reverses this: For Hegel “essence must appear” (Science of Logic), that is the phenomenon of history appears in objects. So the essence of things is known but its apperception is shot-through with dialectical stitching. But here we must be careful not to misunderstand what we mean by “dialectical”—for this is one of the most misused philosophical concepts of all times. First of all when you think of the dialectic you must always remember that what’s at play is being able to see two or more things at once. So if you’re a Puritanical thinker (especially one of these secular “self-righteous” thinkers who only sees the world in shallow black and white terms alone (i.e., Man vs. Woman; Master vs. Slave; the Signified vs. the signifier etc.) you simply are unable to actually “think” beyond a child-like mindset. The adventure of the dialectic invites you to perceive a thing (say a desk) and its opposite (its non-existence) at the same time through the very phenomenological “showing” of its very absence! But that is not all, thinking dialectically asks something more over you—you must now think at the same time the desk and the non-desk AND then think the negation of the thought [desk/non-desk]. And finally you must think, the desk/non-desk and the negation of [desk/non-desk] at the same time. And now you have the following: Desk, then, the non-desk. Then [desk/non-desk] and non [desk/non-desk] Then non- [desk/non-desk] and non [desk/non-desk]

But wait, you might ask, when does this process stop? Ah…, well, there’s where the good and the bad emerges. The bad new is that it never stops, which is precisely why it’s good news. It’s good news that the process (the dialectical process) never stops because that means that the process, like the dude abides, but unlike the dude the dialectic abides forever. It would be bad if someone finally were able to think all processes at once, because this would be a fascist thought because nothing would escape its mind—the dialectic would close down into a singularity—a cell-bloc. This would mean that the mind would have captured all possibilities of how thought expresses itself, like the self-righteous puritanical thinker mentioned above. And if that were the case, the mind would cancel itself out because it would no longer have anything to think (as it has already thought everything, and if you have already thought everything, well then there’s nothing left to think anymore). This is why puritanical thinkers (and there are a disturbing amount of them with PhDs) literally can only ever repeat what was already said instead of thinking a new possibility and live through a creative process of life and thought.

So, it follows from this that because we can think something else (something else other than what we are currently thinking) then we must have a mind. In other words, because there’s something else to think, thinking is possible. Which also means that the very possibility of thinking is the very condition for thinking itself. To think means that something is both grasped by the mind and at the same time something is escaping its grasp. So to do something positive (like capturing an object of perception) means something negative is taking place (the perception of the object’s negation) then, it follows that there is something more to thinking than simply capturing the object). The object thus becomes an “icon” that reveals something more than itself through the very revelation of itself in the world. From this insight we can further conclude that there is more to thinking than thinking, namely thinking is beyond thinking; or that thought is the condition of itself in its own negation. Or to put this slightly differently, there is something beyond the mind that gives rise to the ability to think. But here we run into a problem, namely what is this “beyond” this mystery that eludes us? Welcome to the dialectical adventure from where there is never an escape!