The Human Cell

17/10/07 The human cell

Here is Durer’s depiction if St. Jerome writing in his cell. I am struck by three aspects of this picture: the light coming in through the window, the skull, and the lion and the dog dozing.The previous engraving by Durer showed the melancholy of a self surrounded by a collage of signs. The light that illuminates that collage comes from a black sun. It is the light provided by the text. The only sign of melancholy is the skull, it suggests the sense of inevitable separation. But Jerome pays it no attention. He is aware neither of the light coming in at the window, nor the animals. His attention is monopolised by the text.

Unlike the figure in the picture of melancholia Jerome is unaware of any loss entailed by his exclusive attention. But does his abstraction indicate that loss has already occurred and that melancholy is inevitable?In the context of the previous picture Durer is surely pointing out how the light of the text, the black sun, is excluding nature. The black sun of the text is the foundation of exclusively human judgement.

Wittgenstein insisted that without a shared language there can be no communication or understanding, because these abilities rely upon the sense of shared concepts. Durer is suggesting another side to the linguistic coin; i.e. the mediation of sense entails a loss. When the perception of other subjects has been eclipsed by the mediation of the printing press, the immediate possibilities are intoxicating, but they are purchased on credit. Melancholy is the price eventually paid for this substitution.However I like to think that Durer’s melancholy figure will be able to stir his dog into life and discover that his loss is not total. He could find that in his unmediated relationship with the dog there is a place where the mute subject can still be found. But this place has no defence against the black sun of sense. Who has not experienced the melancholy look of a dog when its perceptions are overruled by a sense that is alien to it?

Without God on our side

Durer's depiction of melancholy among a collage of objects. The only light in which these objects appear is the light of a black sun. Does melancholy result from an absense of natural light; i.e. the light provided by spectacles?

The light provided by spectacles is a mutable tradition.
But, I think I can hear you saying, ‘After deconstruction who can do philosophy and literature without parodying traditions?’.

It seems to me that we have learnt from the deconstructive movement in philosophy that there can be no end, no conclusion and no decision within a tradition. We have come to realise that a tradition does not consist of an identity because it is comprised of a network of contingent parts answerable to each other. It does not seem undesirable to recognise that philosophy is a tradition in this sense.

But the deconstruction of a definite identity has often carried along with it an unjustified deconstruction of the subject. The subject has been identified with the logocentric deployment of language. But speech is not necessarily literal and logocentric; it may require written differences, but it can be a spectacle that makes a turn in a tradition. A tradition is historical; i.e. it does not entail the parody that characterises the flaneur at the end of history.

Unlike a paradigm a tradition does not have God on its side.

Culture is a mixture of processes

These two photos were taken in the Lake District last week.

What do I mean by a complex subjectivity? A complex subjectivity is characterised by the tacit otherness and answerability of its parts. Answerability is the process in which the overall perspective of the complex subjectivity endures and changes in response to the emergence of new parts. I call this inclusive and historical perspective a ‘tradition’. Speech in a tradition is the performance of a spectacle whose intention is the incremental emergence of a changed tradition. Spectacular speech is a ‘bottom up’ process within a complex subjectivity.

Most works of art are spectacles. They are events that change the complex subjectivity of a tradition. Fry and Bell understood art works as examples of ‘significant form’. This suggests that significant forms are spectacles. The claim that art works imply the existence of transcendent forms can be replaced by the observation that they are parts of an enduring and emergent historical tradition.

Literal speech is a ‘top down’ process within a paradigms which provide people with definite & exclusive representations. These representations are constructions that provide explicit criteria of right & wrong. Paradigms allow human beings to dominate nature. They make human beings accountable to the paradigm they adopt.

Most societies consist of a mixture of answerability and accountability. The balance between the processes, and the direction in which the balance is changing, is a central characteristic of a society’s culture.