"Men can see nothing around them that is not their own image; everything speaks to them of themselves. Their very landscape is alive" -Marx
In class, we frequently remind ourselves of Hegel's warning: if you cannot say it, it isn't true. I suppose I agree with this statement. If I cannot figure out how to effectively communicate information, then that information will never exist to anyone else but me and then perhaps is just an edifying memory. But I wonder if we can extend this idea about truth to other modes of communication. Language is not just bound to speech or writing or art. There is also a language of the space in which we inhabit; a kind of ethnographic correspondence to the identity of a place that has a historical development and a language all its own.
Guy Debord, french Marxist theorist stated that "geography, for example, deals with determinant action of general natural forces, such as soil composition or climatic condition, but also the economic structure of society, and thus, on the corresponding conception that such a society can have of a world." We can manipulate our physical space to accomplish some greater aim for society and it is according to our will that the world is shaped. However, space is inhabited and is a living thing as such and not just subject to a kind of outsider, objective will, rather, physical space is ever-changing, whether geologically or anthropologically according to those who occupy that space. The development of consciousness then, is not merely a product of the way we see the world, but also the way we move through it. However, things like maps inherently contain political assumptions (think Copernican revolution) that orient our movement.
The map is created to depict land that is shaped by us and in doing so, we again shape our landscape. With space itself becoming the product of inhabiting, Debord's philosophy is entirely more empirical and individualist than Marx, focusing on The Dérive – the French word for an aimless stroll – which institutes the city as a network of narratives, experiences and events. I like Debord's approach to finding truth with the world we inhabit. An image of ourselves is always accessible and by becoming aware of our preconceived meanings and possibilities in the world, we can find a truth of our physical space. I wonder if this is too materialist or individualistic to be considered Hegelian, but I do feel like looking to the apprehensible, phenomenological world for truth maybe something connects here. Our physical space could be evidence of a historical movement and is perhaps communicating that movement to us, if we are to look rationally upon it.
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I haven't done much work with Debord, but it seems that he's moving toward a more hermeneutical view of experience, which has its roots in Hegel's phenomenology but really gets expanded by Heidegger and Gadamer. When you say that "An image of ourselves is always accessible and by becoming aware of our preconceived meanings and possibilities in the world, we can find a truth of our physical space," you're getting at the hermeneutical concept of "always already"—that is, that we are always already experiencing the world, so any understandings that we come to are based on certain presuppositions. Take language, for example (and here I'm dealing with language as we tend to think of it, as spoken or written); when we speak or are spoken to, our conversations are predicated on the notion that we're using the same words to talk about the same things. Much of philosophy (particularly the analytic sorts) consists of arguments about what we mean or should mean by certain words; to me, this is indicative of the fact that there can't be absolutely fixed connotative meanings for the words that we use, as much of that meaning stems from personal experience and cultural/historical situatedness. "Truth," in both the Hegelian and hermeneutical sense, is not a certain point of knowledge, but the entire process. I think Debord is on board (pardon the pun) with that.
ReplyDeleteReading your post, I thought about my metaphysics discussion from this past week on Kant's ideas of space. He perceives space (and time) as a necessary condition to experience, which is it through experience that we receive knowledge. He tries to show that we cannot know without the existence of space, because it is infinite, singular, and nothing can be seen outside of it. I like your interpretation space constantly changing and how "The development of consciousness then, is not merely a product of the way we see the world, but also the way we move through it." Since we can individually change space, yet all space is interconnected, it made me question in a more Kantian sense of impact space can upon the conscious. A person cannot think of two spaces at once, yet two spaces can change individually therefore it affects the whole. If one cannot know experience then without space, what is the correlation between the two?
ReplyDeleteInteresting connection. I think it makes sense that our physical space is evidence of a historical movement, because they space that we inhabit now and travel through, is as it is because of what others had done to it historically. We can trace all developments back a substantial amount, and this in itself gives us that historical line.
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