Despite what certain anthropologist might say, to my mind almost nothing "discovered" by the new biology disproves anything Marx said. Rather, Marxist social critique allows us to see the extent to which today's most "cutting-edge" and "objective" science is still tremendously, and unconsciously, informed by bourgeois ideology - in particular the myth of the modern couple and nuclear family as "natural, right, God-ordained and time-honored" social institutions. No matter how far back into human origins we excavate, everything we find always seems to look like little more than a slightly shaggier, or more savage version of Norman Rockwell. This sort of narcissistic projection is one of the principal reasons Marx found it imperitive to destroy (which is to say, debunk the myth of) Nature, beginning with Human Nature.
This is exactly what I was talking about in these earlier posts:
How are the Museum and the University changed if we begin to think of them not in common-sense terms as a containers holding contents, but rather as spaces created out of dis-contents, which is to say ideological orders composed out of an array of signs? Museums, and the Historical-Survey courses and the specialized disciplines and objective sciences we are trained in at college, and especially the signs and labels within them; all exist for our pacificatory reassurance. And yet, from a more brutal perspective, or perhaps simply that of the cultural outsider, what if we were to consider the Museum and the University as kinds of murder weapons. This startling view opens before us the moment we begin to see that signs and labels veritably constitute the Museum and cientific Truth themselves. Science is nothing but an order of signs. And signs always mitigate, mediate our fear of the unknown. As Hegel said, the name is the murder of the actual thing. Thus the importance of naming, labelling and functionalizing all contents within museums, canonical literature and university courses. Labels in museums and textbooks never scream. But they gently put their arm around us and whisper softly in our ears, This is really that.One of the most salient points of Timothy Lenoir's essay "The Naturalized History Museum" (click) is to suggest that, for better or worse, the primary, if not the ultimate function of museums, is to convert things into signs. Which is precisely why he invokes the discipline of semiotics, the study of signs and how they function to create an artificial nature. It is the return of the repressed, the reappearance of the corpse, which is one of the best ways to reveal how signs kill reality, and how what we perceive to be nature is in fact an arbitrary and often violent cultural imposition. If you follow this, then you will be able to see how suddenly this Gober piece below, which to most people would look just plain weird, is actually quite readable, and in fact makes perfect sense.
Robert Gober - American
Museum Installation (1992)
Here's a link to E.T.A Hoffmann's classic narrative of "otherness," "The Sandman": (click!) If you read it, or just follow my writings, you'll see how Marx, though highly indebted to Kantian dialectical thought, nevertheless attempts to move beyond it by identifying within it an residual fetishism (a powerful believe in the personal agency of inanimate objects). The fetishist, by clinging to a utopian myths of a primordial state of original wholeness (such as the belief in an un-castrated phallic mother), as well as to the objects which represent to him that state of lost plenitude, furnishes himself with an alibi - a disavowal or false resolution of the fundamental contradiction of sexual difference.
Perhaps I'm just going out on a limb here, but what if there really were a moral to the story in Hoffmann's "The Sandman"? Suppose that Nathaniel really is suffering from some sort of primordially repressed trauma, one he is doomed to repeat indefinitely, and escapes only through self-destruction. The strange and unfortunate events of his college days, then, are just a repetition of a childhood trauma. And these childhood fears in turn, as I said in class, for all that they are understandable, nevertheless seem themselves to be insufficiently motivated by the child Nathaniel's situation and history. One could re-construct behind Nathaniel's traumatic encounter with Coppelius a dim primal scence in which he was first deprived of a beloved object, most likely a doll which was snatched from him 
and shattered before his eyes. The moral of the story is not that we shouldn't fall in love with dolls, but rather that we should admit and accept that loving a doll is as close to true Love as we're ever going to get. At least as far as Nathaniel is concerned, at first we can say that he made a mistake by preferring Olympia to Clara. But when we go back and read the narrator's description of Clara (her deep swimmingpool eyes and empty sense of silent detachment, as well as her immediate lack of other more apparent charms) we begin to realize what love actually is, and perhaps also why Kant chose to remain a bachelor. To fall in love, at least for Kant, is never to fall in love with the person immediately before you, but rather with the lack and emptiness deep within them, one which reflects your own inner sense of primordial loss.
But, again, why should that bother him so much unless this incident too was merely a repetition of an even prior loss. Are not these also repetition of an even prior traums, one completely inaccessible to Nathanial's memory specifically because his very Memory (the consistent story which represents his entire Biography) is in fact nothing but a story he himself has created as a rationalization and defense against the trauma of coming intoBeing in the first place. Everyting happens "as if" some utterly inscrutable event or intention were directing his life from a realm beyond our comprehension, as if some inaccessible force were warping his entire reality, were bending the very fabric of Time and Space into a loop of recurrences centered around a lack. What we see in Nathaniel's case, then, is an odd and disturbing fascination with Life (recall that he is a Biology student), but behind this an even deeper and more compelling fascination with something utter unknow lurking behind Life. The figure of Olympia would then appear as that beautiful object, which because of the uncanny way in which it stands poised at the border between Life and Death, between the Animate and the Inanimate; allows Nathaniel to contemplate and engage his primary interests, which are Death and (Self-)Destruction, but always from a safe remove.
What the Uncanny, and Kant's philosophy as well, allows us to see, is that we are always strangers in this world, that our true identity and home lies somewhere we can not go and can not even remember. Our only access to our true selves is through the pure force of Reason, which is no longer simply a set of operations which can be used in order to distinguish right from wrong, and true from false. Rather, Reason, in the Kantian sense, is an active and seemingly alien force (or conscience) operating from somewhere deep within us always reminding us that the world of appearance is not our true home, and that the only way to make the world into an home for ourselves is by paying strict attention to an alien and contentless Voice and sense of Duty which seems inexplicably to come to us from somewhere completely outside of know reality. This is a completely anti-hedonistic philosophy. We have no reason to believe that doing the Good will make life any sweeter, either for ourselves or others. In starkest contrast with the epicurian Diderot who warned us against the dangers of Theatre, which would seduce away from reality; for Kant "Reality" itself is nothing but a theatre of dreams of our own making. The goal of true philosophy here would be always to acknowledge that the world is our own creation, and to strive to think and act in such a way that the sum of our actions will produce a narrative with the most coherent and inclusive possible plot.
Our lives, according to this view of things, are not simply a string of events, either arbitrarily or necessary linked together, but rather a constant struggle to create Beauty and Meaning despite the fact that we have been given no instructions manual whatsoever. In this kind of abstract and expressionist reality, each person's Life is nothing but a work of Art. And what keeps each of us alive is not money or food or clothing or shelter, but rather, in the most transcendental and aesthetic sense, sheer Interest. Thus the main causes of death are primarily two:
1) BOREDOM, when we simply decide to stop writing our lives because it's no longer interesting--Lack of Interest.
2) FEAR, when the struggle to continue living in a constant state of improvisation, or suspense becomes too much for us, and we simply drop the pen, or jump to the end of the book and read the last page to see how the story ends--Excess of Interest.
The alternative to these extremes, for Kant, lies in between these two, not as a happy balance of but instead in a state of perpetual ANXIETY. Enlightenment, here, is no longer the beaming and acquiescent optimism of Voltaire's Candide, who assumes all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds. Rather, Kantian Enlightenment depends upon each individual's ability to maintain a firmness of judgment and will sufficient for clarity of mind and dignity of conduct in the midst of a world in which their are no guarantees.
and shattered before his eyes. The moral of the story is not that we shouldn't fall in love with dolls, but rather that we should admit and accept that loving a doll is as close to true Love as we're ever going to get. At least as far as Nathaniel is concerned, at first we can say that he made a mistake by preferring Olympia to Clara. But when we go back and read the narrator's description of Clara (her deep swimmingpool eyes and empty sense of silent detachment, as well as her immediate lack of other more apparent charms) we begin to realize what love actually is, and perhaps also why Kant chose to remain a bachelor. To fall in love, at least for Kant, is never to fall in love with the person immediately before you, but rather with the lack and emptiness deep within them, one which reflects your own inner sense of primordial loss.But, again, why should that bother him so much unless this incident too was merely a repetition of an even prior loss. Are not these also repetition of an even prior traums, one completely inaccessible to Nathanial's memory specifically because his very Memory (the consistent story which represents his entire Biography) is in fact nothing but a story he himself has created as a rationalization and defense against the trauma of coming into
What the Uncanny, and Kant's philosophy as well, allows us to see, is that we are always strangers in this world, that our true identity and home lies somewhere we can not go and can not even remember. Our only access to our true selves is through the pure force of Reason, which is no longer simply a set of operations which can be used in order to distinguish right from wrong, and true from false. Rather, Reason, in the Kantian sense, is an active and seemingly alien force (or conscience) operating from somewhere deep within us always reminding us that the world of appearance is not our true home, and that the only way to make the world into an home for ourselves is by paying strict attention to an alien and contentless Voice and sense of Duty which seems inexplicably to come to us from somewhere completely outside of know reality. This is a completely anti-hedonistic philosophy. We have no reason to believe that doing the Good will make life any sweeter, either for ourselves or others. In starkest contrast with the epicurian Diderot who warned us against the dangers of Theatre, which would seduce away from reality; for Kant "Reality" itself is nothing but a theatre of dreams of our own making. The goal of true philosophy here would be always to acknowledge that the world is our own creation, and to strive to think and act in such a way that the sum of our actions will produce a narrative with the most coherent and inclusive possible plot.Our lives, according to this view of things, are not simply a string of events, either arbitrarily or necessary linked together, but rather a constant struggle to create Beauty and Meaning despite the fact that we have been given no instructions manual whatsoever. In this kind of abstract and expressionist reality, each person's Life is nothing but a work of Art. And what keeps each of us alive is not money or food or clothing or shelter, but rather, in the most transcendental and aesthetic sense, sheer Interest. Thus the main causes of death are primarily two:
1) BOREDOM, when we simply decide to stop writing our lives because it's no longer interesting--Lack of Interest.
2) FEAR, when the struggle to continue living in a constant state of improvisation, or suspense becomes too much for us, and we simply drop the pen, or jump to the end of the book and read the last page to see how the story ends--Excess of Interest.
The alternative to these extremes, for Kant, lies in between these two, not as a happy balance of but instead in a state of perpetual ANXIETY. Enlightenment, here, is no longer the beaming and acquiescent optimism of Voltaire's Candide, who assumes all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds. Rather, Kantian Enlightenment depends upon each individual's ability to maintain a firmness of judgment and will sufficient for clarity of mind and dignity of conduct in the midst of a world in which their are no guarantees.
OLYMPIA
From the collection of wax anatomical specimens at Museo La Specola in Bologna, Italy.
(click here to go their site)
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