I. THE CASE

Philoso­phers would do well to employ with greater fre­quency the metaphor. Did I say hier­ar­chy? What I really meant, was lad­der. And yes—in this par­tic­u­lar and seem­ingly inverted order. Fur­ther­more, the synec­doche may be use­ful in por­tray­als of con­cepts typ­i­cally left untouched, i.e. treated as “highly con­tro­ver­sial.” This inge­niously mul­ti­far­i­ous lit­er­ary device, serves to min­i­mize or max­i­mize the effects of any given idea: such that, denot­ing one prop­erty, say the whip belong­ing to a men­ac­ing slave dri­ver, it pro­poses to embody (in text or in speech) said men­ace in all his atro­cious entirety. Like­wise: denot­ing some thing in its entirety, such as “the coun­try” in the phrase “the coun­try passed a law to abol­ish slavery”—the synec­doche may also refer to one prop­erty of its sub­ject, and voila—the house of rep­re­sen­ta­tives (in text or in speech) is seduc­tively por­trayed as, god bless her, the entire USA.

That this lit­er­ary device and other such devices are avoided and warned against in philo­soph­i­cal writ­ings is a fact which results from their use and abuse by philoso­phers whose motives one might rightly deem “impure.” It is not my inten­tion to expli­cate or cri­tique the con­tent of these writings—but to sal­vage for our field those invalu­able tools which in their mis­han­dling are ren­dered taboo, or all but unus­able. For exam­ple: a philoso­pher of the nine­teenth and twen­ti­eth cen­tury, whose polit­i­cal affil­i­a­tions will now for­ever haunt him, ver­i­fi­ably affirmed that Nazi infor­mants “would under­stand” that by “move­ment” he indeed had meant “National Socialism”—where the rest of the stu­dents enrolled in his sem­i­nar remained obliv­i­ous recep­tors to sub­lim­i­nal NSDAP pro­pa­ganda, at very least to ideals con­gru­ent with those upheld by Nazism.

With­out illu­mi­nat­ing the cross bones and skull and, in a word, the evil—for this should be starkly appar­ent to us all—I will cast light on the method here employed as to trans­form a com­mon tool into a tor­ture device. Tech­ni­cally speak­ing: this philoso­pher is guilty—political affil­i­a­tions aside—of deceit, pure and sim­ple. In his case, inten­tion is lit­er­ally everything—for his work and its recep­tion (for bet­ter or worse), the depth and scope of his phi­los­o­phy, hinges on this claim: he didn’t own it. Ret­i­cence, the abil­ity to exer­cise reserve on occa­sions when speech does not suf­fice, and silence is called for, a virtue with which poets are all-too-familiar—loses all “vir­tu­os­ity” when used as a weapon of con­ceal­ment.

Or such is the ver­dict arrived at by those who, in said philosopher’s case, have been deceived. Speak­ing as a poet-philosopher for whom “virtues,” in short, are in the eyes of the beholder: the writer whose ret­i­cence leaves the reader in the trenches of mis­trust, at once betrayed and inca­pable of trusting—is not merely “immoral,” but a liv­ing sac­ri­fice for his (real or per­ceived) immoral­ity. His phi­los­o­phy, by virtue of its inher­ent con­tin­gency, must burn at what­ever self-righteous “stake” his reader base erects in his posthu­mous pres­ence; it must coil up in smoke as a tes­ta­ment to our suspicions—affirming the worst of them, even as it shrieks not so.

It seems that what he should have done, aside from the obvious—but far be it from me to pre­scribe another’s lobotomy—is speak up: if not for the sake of his ideas, those which, I’ll grant it, have inde­ter­mi­nately polit­i­cal strings attached—then for the sake of his field. For to allow “one’s own” to be taken down out of fear, or for the sake of one’s fleet­ing sur­vival, or I don’t know what mor­tal coil of cow­ardly excuses—is as evil of an act as they come. Now what philoso­pher will risk her skin, when she knows that one slip (or one mis­in­ter­pre­ta­tion) could result in—forget her lit­er­ary death—the destruc­tion of the time­less idea?

In the Infor­ma­tion Age, when rea­sons to think become fewer and fur­ther between, we—who fear for human­ity the loss of self aware­ness, the penul­ti­mate loss of mean­ing­ful inter­ac­tions, and ulti­mately: of mean­ing­ful existence—we, the pre­servers of authen­tic being, find our­selves in our most pre­car­i­ous posi­tion to date. Now the ques­tion is not: do we speak?—for we know the globe, verg­ing on sen­sory over­load, has ordered the death of every weak voice or vir­tu­ous voice of ret­i­cence. The ques­tion is now, not if—but how. How does one artic­u­late a crit­i­cal mes­sage to a world that accepts not calls, but only “texts”—not Texts, but only “blogs”—not thoughts, but only frag­ments? And of the ear­lier ques­tion: sup­pos­ing one can, despite what forces work against him, estab­lish a voice that is just strong enough so that when pitched across the signal-strewn hori­zon, it at least reaches someone—how, dear reader, should he go about say­ing what he must? How care­ful he must be, lest he scare away his last poten­tial ally. Here is where the speaker—be he philoso­pher, poet, sci­en­tist, or child—begins cater­ing his style to a for­mu­lated model, or the clos­est effec­tive point of reference.

The philoso­pher suc­cumbs to his hoard’s lat­est trend: the ana­lytic, the explicit, the triv­ial, the tedious—not dar­ing to leave one pompous name un-cited, one motive un-accounted for, one les­son to be worked for—for fear of being lumped with Those Not To Be Trusted, or worse, Those Unqual­i­fied To Speak. The poets write fash­ion­ably con­fes­sional lan­guage poems—cute vignettes just bor­der­ing on pre­cious­ness, spruced-up with a touch of exotic-sounding ver­biage, bend­ing over back­ward to be, simul­ta­ne­ously, “the hot new thing” and exactly the same. The sci­en­tists roil their caul­drons, tak­ing great care to find, in each beaker, what they wish to appear: any “truth” that bids them: con­tinue down road I’ve paved before you. And the children—need I elaborate?—we were once chil­dren, too.

Allow me, then, to speak clearly. What you are about to be pre­sented with is highly alle­gor­i­cal. By hier­ar­chy I mean lad­der—to be taken as a sym­bol. Glob­al­iza­tion is pre­cisely a synecdoche—to be taken as a sub­ject on which this author’s stance is essen­tially neu­tral, but which encom­passes a prop­erty that is essen­tial to this body of work. For­get Hei­deg­ger. For­get decep­tion, the seducer’s so-called style. I’ll show you reticence.

II. THE TRIAL

Most adver­saries of the move­ment toward glob­al­iza­tion are more or less fanatic preser­va­tion­ists. That invalu­able vari­ants shall be lost in the move—from mul­ti­plic­ity to sin­gu­lar­ity, from nature to nurture—only to turn up cen­turies later in World Society’s his­tor­i­cal junk drawer: is the “lower class” of such adver­saries’ ulti­mate con­cern. Whis­per­ing among them­selves, the mem­bers of their crowd appear pro­foundly, how­ever second-handedly, con­scious: of the com­plex­i­ties which cur­rently styl­ize world culture—profoundly, how­ever hypo­thet­i­cally, aware: of the Void that would result from such a crim­i­nal erasure.

Con­sti­tut­ing the “mid­dle class” are myr­iad opposers who hold in their pos­ses­sion a tele­scope of terror—a tele­scope which mag­ni­fies the Future World Pic­ture etched above, and through which they envi­sion not only tragic loss, but also that which threat­ens to “replen­ish” us. Less trou­bled by the fact that cer­tain cul­tures, cer­tain doc­trines and tastes, cer­tain ide­olo­gies, will inevitably slip through the cracks of our veg­e­ta­tive mind-frame—this class of preser­va­tion­ists’ great­est con­cern is that what feeds off such corpses will be a tree of such pro­por­tions as to block from the sun what should rightly go on flour­ish­ing. “In the dom­i­neer­ing shadow of col­lec­tive con­scious­ness, not only will the weaker schools of thought go extinct—but so too, the fittest of the fit,” they might say, “for it is in the very nature of “major­ity rules” (and such is the nature of any collective’s worth: quan­tifi­able) to defeat each minority’s most qual­i­fied.”

Sur­vival of the Fittest holds true as a the­ory, is rightly enforced as a nat­ural law—only, how­ever, in worlds that pay mind to Nature. Our cur­rent world, deca­dent as it is, arti­fi­cial as it is beneath the guise of “intel­li­gence,” remains, I will grant it, a world in which stan­dards still can apply, in which the fittest—even when dis­missed or overlooked—still sur­vive. In a stan­dard­ized world, this mid­dle class is quick to warn, all will fall sub­or­di­nate to the New World Order, and it will be the loom­ing and many-limbed entity whose shade has now started to creep across our arms, our backs, our faces—that destroy us: not fickle weather pat­terns, not dis­eased foliage, not old age, not atomic bombs. This class knows the tran­sience of form, the strug­gle to “make it,” like the back of their mud-stained hands. Far be it from them to bribe, or shirk death. It isn’t death, after all, that betrays these warriors—whose last breath would never curse fate, but instead, say: we’ve no one to blame but our­selves.

But if and only if, the upper class chimes in, our arch­en­e­mies must bow to fate as well, can we with­stand them. These are the indi­vid­u­als whose aver­sion to glob­al­iza­tion stems from an aver­sion to that which wills to shrink down nature: a qual­ity toward which glob­al­iza­tion trends, and which the glob­al­ized cul­ture engen­ders. The ten­dency to min­i­mize one’s options, to dimin­ish one’s scope, to ignore (not inter­change­able with the verb “to root out”) pos­si­bil­i­ties and divert one’s atten­tion to what­ever ideal one has cho­sen, is taught, or counts as given: it is these par­tic­u­lar prop­er­ties we oppose—calling all oth­ers coin­ci­den­tal. The lower and mid­dle class con­cerns, if valid—dance around this prob­lem as unwit­tingly as moths around a light source. Like­wise, that which car­ries globalization’s fiery torch: valid rea­sons, rea­sons of inter­est, still fail to take own­er­ship of all they rep­re­sent, includ­ing that mean streak, that vio­let capac­ity to bring a build­ing to its knees, to reduce a dense for­est to a man-made, smoke-screened illu­sion.

The lim­its of lan­guage are the lim­its of our world—when taken in the lit­eral, such that “world” means “globe”—is a pro­posal for a rule which states: only he who is flu­ent in some six thou­sand lan­guages is equipped to deci­pher real­ity. The learn­ing of a lan­guage for pur­poses of know­ing (to say noth­ing of expand­ing) one’s lim­its, in accor­dance with Wittgen­stein, is exactly to learn a lan­guage for language’s sake. This same recur­sive model we refer to when refer­ring to “knowl­edge for the sake of knowl­edge” or “art for the sake of art.” Con­trar­ily, an excur­sive state­ment would read: “Where a man’s trea­sure is, his heart is also.” “Also” here sug­gests a co-dependency of sub­jects: not, in other words, that one’s “trea­sure” and one’s “heart” are iden­ti­cal. Now “the lim­its of lan­guage” might con­cur­rently read: “the rea­son­ing capac­ity of some six thou­sand lan­guages.” Not “the key to under­stand­ing” the map of human expe­ri­ence, the capac­ity of lan­guage, as Wittgen­stein would have it, is the exact equiv­a­lent to said expe­ri­ence. The state­ment can be thus reversed: the lim­its of our world are the lim­its of our lan­guage. And con­tin­u­ing is this pat­tern: our world is our lan­guage, our lan­guage our world. And round and round we go until, deaf and mute, the world “drops off”—just as the minds which existed “pre-enlightenment” believed it to.

At our thought experiment’s nat­ural end, lies a para­dox. The one who would real­ize, via lin­guis­tic acqui­si­tion, the outer lim­its of con­scious exis­tence: must live, some three thou­sand lives, as it were, and die—a mar­tyr alone in his bed cham­ber, dic­tio­nary in hand, not hav­ing par­taken of a sin­gle life expe­ri­ence, a human con­ver­sa­tion, essen­tially: not hav­ing lived. Such a life would have nec­es­sar­ily been devoted, from the bot­tle (to the hemlock—as Socrates would have it) to expan­sion­ism à la vocab­u­lary. What’s that, Frau Plato? I’ve uttered some phrase that hath offend­eth thee? Those fol­low­ing the exper­i­ment, per­haps advo­cates of glob­al­iza­tion, may take the results and run (their mouths) to an equally ver­bose con­clu­sion. One might say that, together with Wittgen­stein, I’ve proven how glob­al­iza­tion, at least that of lan­guage, would enable every “lit­er­ate” being to grasp real­ity at birth, hold close to the notion until death—and in the time betwixt: sim­ply live. It seems that such a for­tune could indeed bring contentment—to one who believes the world’s cir­cum­fer­ence to be equal in mea­sure to one’s own back­yard, or amount­ing to no more than that which is describ­able in Ger­man (or, god help us, in Eng­lish) terms. Not a pretty pic­ture, how­ever “unforgettable.”

We now grasp the para­dox­i­cal nature of our task. Far from rel­a­tivism, fur­ther still from nihilism, are those who see the com­plex “all” that is at risk—and the monothe­ism which threat­ens to replace it—and see fur­ther how the attempt to “delimit” one’s real­ity through a manic con­sump­tion of “new knowl­edge” is counterpro­duc­tive. (Nor, as a solu­tion, is it less prob­lem­atic than attempts to “com­pre­hend” one’s real­ity by striv­ing to limit it—as if the shades and hues of human expe­ri­ence sim­ply drain the moment we avert our gaze, as if Chaos gave a damn about our dumbed-down vocab­u­lar­ies.) Con­tain­ment, iso­la­tion, con­ser­va­tion, preservation—while serv­ing to ensure mul­ti­plic­ity and diver­sity, and a stab at sur­vival for the shrewdest Individuals—these val­ues, left alone, serve only to degen­er­ate our faces into fables, our por­tals into garbage dis­pos­als, through which “all will soon enough return” (the sage crosses his heart) to either earth or pur­ple Ether. Thereby, what, refut­ing all—desire?—to ven­ture out beyond our front doors…