edenism

There has been a lot of confusion about what exactly metamodernism is, so here is an FQA (Frequently Questioned Answers) to help you troubleshoot your understanding.

Metamodernism is not:

1. A stage in the linear progress of philosophy, culture, or politics. If you believe in linear progress, you are probably a modernist.

2. A return to modernism. The issues raised by postmodernism cannot be thwarted by being “modernist but self-aware” with the possible exception of art. (This is possible in art because being modern in a postmodern age takes on a new meaning, e.g. making cave paintings in 2019 does not have the same meaning that it does if you actually dwell in a cave.)

3. The final answer to any question / a grand narrative. The tools of deconstruction still apply; there is always something outside of the existing discourse. See (2).

4. Reconstructing what was deconstructed in postmodernism. If you think this, you probably think that deconstruction means something like “breaking things into their parts.” If you are confused about deconstruction, you might try reading this: https://www.iep.utm.edu/deconst/.

5. Oscillating between postmodernism and modernism. This confusion probably comes from metamodern art that oscillates between irony and sincerity, but equating modernism with sincerity and postmodernism with irony is overly simplistic: Ulysses is a great modern novel, and The Bluest Eye is a great postmodern novel.

6. Something that can be understood without understanding postmodernism. If you think that postmodernism is relativism or “cultural marxism” see (4).

7. Something that is easy to separate from postmodernism. The metamodernist reply to a postmodernist critique is “yes, and...” In fact, metamodernists can be described as postmodernists.

8. John Dewey's Pragmatism. (A post on this is coming soon.)

There is an unwritten rule in fiction that seers must be on the margins of society. Examples of stories that abide by this rule abound: The Stand, The Shining, Sula, and even Elie Wiesel's Night. Of course, the obvious counterexample to this rule is that of the biblical prophets; if the seer is necessarily the Remainder, how can a Jewish prophet be the Remainder (in a Jewish tradition)? This is because, as Slavoj Zizek explains in The Puppet and the Dwarf, “the Jews are...a remainder in and of themselves – the rest, that which remains and persists after all the persecutions and annihilations.” The apocalyptic prophet Daniel is no exception to this rule, since he is part of the Jewish Remainder in Babylon (and his Babylonian name, Belteshazzar, bears witness to this fact). The difference, of course, between Daniel and The Stand's Abagail Freemantle, is that (apropos of normative American society) Abagail is the Remainder without, whereas Daniel is the Remainder within. This shift can be attributed to modernity: the passage of the locus of privileged sight from the Remainder within to the Remainder without. The necessity of this shift in modernity is elucidated by examining the nature of this privileged sight. To use Lacanian terminology, the seer is one who is given an ability to partially answer the question “che vuoi” (what do you want?) apropos of the Other, where the Other here is found in some notion of divinity, and in being given this partial answer can attempt to answer the question “what do I want?” With this in mind, it should be apparent how the loss of access to the Other which defines modernity leads to to the locus of this privileged insight shifting to outside the social. Nathaniel Peaslee, the unfortunate victim of possession in Lovecraft's “The Shadow Out of Time,” is the exception that proves this rule. While Lovecraft's horror is often described as the horror of the unknown, it is better described as the horror of the unknown as seen by Society (rather than its Remainder). By giving such a character access to the brutal and incomprehensible Other (which is no less brutal and incomprehensible in the Bible), Lovecraft creates a gross inversion: what should be marginal is normative. To see why this choice is so transgressive, we need only turn to the aforementioned connection between “che vuoi” and “what do I want?” By virtue of Nathaniel's access to an incomprehensible Other (“che vuoi”), the reader is left with a sense of nihilism (“what do I want”). By virtue of Nathaniel's normativity, this nihilism cannot be easily dismissed and threatens the foundations of modernity. It is no surprise, then, that those who read the Necronomicon are thrust from the Social into the Remainder due to insanity.

The Jeff Nichols film Take Shelter, then, as a film that assigns the role of seer to a working-class white man (Curtis), appears to be another exception to the rule of the seer. However, there is an important distinction: whereas Lovecraft's characters come undeniably face-to-face with the Other, Curtis is given only ambiguity, and it is only reasonable to conclude that his mind is the issue he must confront. This is already much different from Lovecraft, because the Other is internal, and it is this that makes all of the difference. If Lovecraft's violation of the rule of the seer is the source of its nihilism, then how is Take Shelter a sincere and meaningful film? This is because Take Shelter does not break the rule of the seer, but adheres to it, and this adherence marks an irreversible shift: the Remainder is no longer without but within. Of course, this event should come as no surprise, for it is the natural conclusion of a societal process that has been running for some time:

“Witness the 'Society' column of Le Monde, in which paradoxically, only immigrants, delinquents, women, etc. appear – everything that has not been socialized, 'social' cases analogous to pathological cases...In designating residual categories as 'Society,' the social designates itself as a remainder.'” — Jean Baudrillard (italics his)

Anyone who denies the reality of or the urgent need to recognize the transubstantiation of the social into the remainder need only observe the “shocking” election of Donald Trump by half of the American population. This is the “storm” of Take Shelter: the vision of the storm, or the process by which Curtis becomes capable of receiving this vision. To explain this effect in terms of social processes: in modernity “God is dead,” so access to the Other must come from the Remainder of society, but the re-integration of the Remainder into the social “proves” that no such access exists. Precisely what makes Take Shelter so compelling is that by stylistically encouraging viewers to compare it to horror, the radical distance between Lovecraft's seer in Society and Nichols's seer in the Remainder becomes all the more apparent.

Chilling Adventures of Sabrina appears to provide a refutation to this hypothesis in the form of the character Rosalind Walker, a black instantiation of the archetypal blind seer. To resolve this issue, we turn again to Zizek, who comments in “Is it Still Possible to be a Hegelian Today?” that “after a true historical break, one simply cannot return to the past, one cannot go on as if nothing happened – if one does it, the same practice acquires a radically changed meaning.” What, then, is the new meaning of this seer in the Remainder? It is first worth noting that the vast majority of the characters in this show with significant screentime see themselves as the Remainder, albeit unconvincingly. Sabrina is a woman and the daughter of a subversive leader, Prudence is a disenfranchised daughter, etc. Even the witches as a Whole perceive themselves as the Remainder of persecution. This attitude is echoed in the characters' relationships with Sabrina (and with each other): no friend is a friend, and no enemy is an enemy. All of these relationships are blown about by unpredictable vicissitudes. What we have in Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, then, is a world where everyone is, to herself, the Remainder. This is also the reason why the show's attempts at direct social effect feel half-hearted; the viewer is not convinced there is any society left to be remedied. Sabrina's identification as the Remainder is the most complex. If Christ, in crying “My god, my god, why hast thou forsaken me,” represents the finite and impotent nature of God, then Sabrina, as the anti-Christ, represents the finite and impotent nature of Luciferian (and liberal) ideals. As Christ is split from God (and God is split from God), Sabrina is at every turn split from herself. In expressing autonomy and individuality, she finds only predestination and coercion, making her the ultimate postmodern subject. In other words, Sabrina's attempts at individuality are constantly thwarted by her inability to answer “che vuoi,” because, whether she turns to her friends, family, deceased family, tradition, Satan, or Lillith she cannot find the locus of her desire. This is, as Sabrina demonstrates, the necessary outcome of liberal processes. Whereas the Other may be identified with the Law in a more conservative society and thereby provide a partial answer to “che vuoi” (even if the only motivation it provides is transgression), by being in such a permissive world Sabrina's inability to identify the Other renders useless her attempts at asserting individuality. This inability to identify the Other explains the instances of privileged sight throughout the show. Rosalind's sight, despite what one would expect, provides no real insight into the Other, Harvey's visions are found to originate in something disappointingly finite, etc. In fact, the impotence of Satan leaves the viewer unsatisfied because Satan was the last remaining candidate for the identity of the Other (a narrative tactic that gives the viewer pleasure in watching Sabrina succumb to his demands). We have, therefore, an indivisible two-fold effect in Sabrina that mirrors the ultimate effect of liberal social processes: individuals are both Remainder and non-Remainder, and the identity of the Other is not ascertainable (i.e. the individual's desires are insoluble and privileged sight is finite). This is why the thorn of Chilling Adventures of Sabrina is also its crown; each character's attempt at making herself the Remainder is subtly thwarted. In short, Chilling Adventures of Sabrina may be emotionally and politically impotent, but this is because of its fidelity to the state of the social.

1. The New Eclecticist seeks to dissolve the bonds on discourse and engage productively with the world despite the limitations of knowledge.

2. The traditional view is that discourse ends in resolution. That ethics aims to tell us what is right and wrong and theology aims to tell us the nature of divinity.

3. Discourse does not end in resolution. Ethical dilemmas are argued ad infinitum and the nature of divinity is intractable.

4. The resolution of discourse was not important to begin with. The value of ethical dilemmas is in their analysis not their resolution, and the nature of divinity is revealed through the failure to reveal the nature of divinity.

5. Discourse has been limited by appeals to authority which are no longer sufficient. The most clear example is the academic monopoly on philosophy.

6. The limitation of discourse has adverse effects with dire political consequences. These include 1) the suppression of voices from outgroups and 2) providing a space for fringe politics, bad popular philosophy, and “race realists” and their ilk to share their ideas without opposition.

7. This limitation comes from imposing rules on acceptable discourse. Examples include academic style, media censorship, political dialectic, and logical positivism.

8. These limitations on discourse are themselves artifacts of discourse.

9. Just as a government's power comes from the willingness of its people to observe it, these limitations on discourse only exist insofar as they are upheld by each person. Since these limitations are just artifacts of discourse, they are all unresolved.

10. Just as an anarchist seeks to dissolve the bonds of the state, the New Eclecticist seeks to dissolve the bonds on discourse.

11. New Eclecticism is not the dissolution of meaning, but the assertion of meaning where it was suppressed.

12. Meaning can be reasserted through pluralism; an individual can use perspectives that do not “rationally” cohere (because rationality is nothing more than a limitation on discourse). Interpreting art from multiple incompatible perspectives leads to better, not worse, understanding of the artwork.

13. Beliefs are a tool. A terminally ill patient who chooses to believe they have a good prognosis is more likely to survive. Criticizing this person on the basis of rationality would be myopic.

14. The use of beliefs as a tool allows a pluralistic reassertion of myth and meaning. Whether or not a man named Jesus physically rose from the dead on the third day is entirely irrelevant. In this way the New Eclecticist engages productively with the world despite the limitations of knowledge.

15. Nothing in this document is exempt from these claims.

The defining feature of modernity is the rejection of existing perspectives (religious, traditional, artistic, etc.) and the desire to create new perspectives from synthesis and innovation. Postmodernism, then, is something like an Incompleteness Theorem for philosophy. Any unified perspective is necessarily incomplete. Of course, the challenge then is to construct something useful despite these limitations. This leads us to metamodernism, which can be described simply as “pluralism of perspective.” One can think of a New Age scientist who practices chemistry by day and Wicca by night or the increasing popularity of astrology by people who profess not to believe in it.

But is such pluralism unique to the last century?

I would like to refer again to Matthew 7:15-20 (which I quoted in https://write.as/edenism/belief-as-a-tool), where Jesus leaves open an opportunity for pluralism by suggesting that we judge beliefs by their impact. Under such a guideline, there seems to be no harm in an anxious student consulting a horoscope for relief or a cancer patient choosing to believe they will be cured.

There is a phenomenon in America, where every conversation about Buddhism quickly converges to a discussion about whether or not Buddhism is a religion. The popular claim is that Buddhism is not a religion because it does not explicitly require any belief in supernatural phenomena, and does not have strict imperatives, but rather suggestions for mitigating dukkha. In other words (according to this account), Buddhism does not require belief in things that cannot be known.

For one thing, it is worth noting that Jesus, in passages like Matthew 5:32, demonstrates that what matters is the principles behind the commandments, rather than the commandments themselves. In this way, it may be possible to claim that Jesus was to Judaism as the Buddha was to Hinduism.

For another, we should, as pluralists of perspective, consider whether religion really makes any requirements of our knowledge at all. Is it necessary to know that there was a man named Jesus whose body rose from the ground after three days any more than it is necessary to know that there was a man named Siddartha who was prophesied to be a spiritual leader? If we are to take the perspective that beliefs should be judged by their beneficence, then the question is irrelevant.

The (mis)application of dilemmas of knowledge to religion can be demonstrated by the current popularity of declaring, if you are not a theist, that you are not an atheist but rather an agnostic. Any reasonable person, theist or atheist, should be agnostic unless they think they are personally privy to divine knowledge.

If, as I suspect, this concern with knowledge is an artifact of the scientific revolution, then it is possible that the problem of religion was never one of knowledge to begin with. In other words, the ancients were already metamodern with respect to religion.

(Of course, it would be ridiculous to claim that the average ancient had a plurality of perspectives, but this is no different from the fact that the average American in 2019 has a pre-modern perspective.)

There is a challenge inherent in attempting to hold a plurality of perspectives; the intellectual tradition extending from the Enlightenment is incompatible with such a construct. This, then, is the work ahead. Perhaps the solution lies in the reification of Discourse.

Update 4/16/19:

I started reading Pragmatism as Post-Postmodernism: Lessons from John Dewey, and it suggests the same point I wrote about above, including the reference to Matthew:

”...[William] James called Pragmatism 'a new name for some old ways of thinking.' He was alluding to a famous saying in the Christian Bible. In the parable of the fig tree related in Matthew 7:16-20...”

1.1 Languages change over time. 1.2 Therefore any “literal” meaning is a consensus opinion that changes as the time and population change. 1.3 Therefore “literal” meaning is a social construct. 1.4 Because “literal” meaning is a social construct, there is no guarantee that every culture / language has such a thing. 1.5 Any “literal” exegesis of foreign / ancient text must be “literal” with respect to some notion of “literal” inherent to the context of the document's creation, which may or may not exist.

Q: Why is literal meaning so prevalent in and even necessary for Western thought if it is not a universal phenomenon?

A: A society based on the living letter (legal, academic, etc.) requires a consensus opinion on what the letter is taken to mean in such a context (in commmon parlance, what the letter “actually” means).

Q: This only accounts for written text. What is literal speech then?

A: “Literal” speech is the “literal” meaning of the written form of the words spoken. Unsurprisingly, the word “literal” comes from the Latin litteralis (which means “of or pertaining to letters or writing”).

Q: Then what about speech that can be written multiple ways? For instance suppose I say what sounds like it could be either “hear a bird” or “here, a bird.”

A: This is precisely why any theory of language that requires a “literal” explanation fails. That is, because it naturally favors writing, and requires the idea of the written word to translate speech. This is graphocentrism.

Q: Are those propositions above? They do not seem very rigorous.

A: What is the nature and purpose of rigor in this context?

Q: To adhere strictly to the use of words with respect to strict rules so that the meaning of the text becomes alive and divorced from your intent, i.e. capable of objective criticism, i.e. the text is capable of being interpreted literally.

Q: Is it better to hold a false belief that is beneficial or to hold a true belief that is harmful?

A: By definition it is better to hold the false belief since it is beneficial, but something about this seems wrong.

Q: What is wrong?

A: I want to say that it is because it is impossible for a false belief to be beneficial, but clearly there can be specific circumstances where this is true. Placebo is one example. Perhaps because in general false beliefs are harmful? But still that does not mean the question is ill-constructed. Perhaps because there is intrinsic value to having true beliefs.

Q: Is it reasonable to say that the aesthetic value of having true beliefs is secondary to tangible benefits to life and happiness?

A: Yes.

Q: Say a prophet comes and you must decide whether to subscribe to his religion. Then you would make this decision on the basis of whether you think believing his claims would be beneficial rather than on the basis of whether you belief his claims are justified?

A: Yes, but no prophet would accept me as a follower on the basis of this. Religion requires believing that the claims are justified, not merely that believing in the claims is beneficial.

Q: When grappling with the same problem, Jesus says:

“Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep's clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves. Ye shall know them by their fruits. Do men gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles? Even so every good tree bringeth forth good fruit; but a corrupt tree bringeth forth evil fruit. A good tree cannot bring forth evil fruit, neither can a corrupt tree bring forth good fruit. Every tree that bringeth not forth good fruit is hewn down, and cast into the fire. Wherefore by their fruits ye shall know them.” (Matthew 7:15-20)

“When we infer any particular cause from an effect, we must proportion the one to the other, and can never be allowed to ascribe to the cause any qualities, but what are exactly sufficient to produce the effect.” — David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Section XI

Hume's point here is theological; that it would be wrong, to, for instance, reason from the current world to the nature of divinity, and then from the nature of divinity to predict the future. What I will try to do here is to use this perspective to better understand the nature and limitations of normative ethical theories. To do so we must begin by working, not within philosophy, but in the examination of philosophy as an institution. We must ask, when a normative theory is proposed, what are the criteria by which it is evaluated? In this case we find that the answer does not differ so greatly from the answer to the equivalent question posed to the natural sciences; every ethical model is judged on the basis of its logical soundness, assumptions, explanatory power, and intuitive appeal. What is most interesting about this is that, like in the natural sciences, the explanatory power of a model (provided it is sound) is by far the most of these criteria. But how is explanatory power measured? To return to ethics, we see that any ethical model is judged on the basis of its ability to align with existing ethical opinion. That is the descriptive function of ethics: to explain why what is clearly wrong is, in fact, clearly wrong and why what is clearly right is, in fact, clearly right. However, ethics also has a prescriptive function. When one looks at the function of a normative theory such as, say, some hedonistic utilitarianism, they expect not only for it to align with commonly-held beliefs, but also for it to provide answers to ethical dilemmas. In fact, one of the most common criticisms of utilitarianist ethical models is their computational intractability. The issue that arises here is exactly the issue that Hume raised: if normative theories are judged on the basis of their ability to describe current ethical opinion, then what can be extrapolated from them is no more than current ethical opinion. In other words, their descriptive nature undermines their prescriptive nature. As an example of the absurdity of appealing to normative ethics to justify any behavior, imagine a man who has just emerged from tribulation and has decided he needs to find a new religion. He walks from church to church in his area for the whole day, and even considers moving if he has to. At the end of the day, he has been to dozens of churches and has an intimate understanding of their views, so he chooses the church that he agrees the most with. A few months later, he finds that the church's leaders have taken an ethical stance he disagrees with. The question is, should he accept this ethical stance on the basis of the church's moral authority? This would make sense except for the fact that it was selected by this man wholly because it was the church that aligned most consistently with his existing beliefs. If there was another church that was identical except for its stance on this one issue, he certainly would have chosen it instead. Therefore, this man would be acting very peculiarly if he were to accept the church's moral authority. In fact, it is a little unclear what his relationship with the church is at all, since the mere fact that he chose it to align with his beliefs means that when he listens to the church it is on the basis of his own authority. That is to say, he goes to church not for divine inspiration, but for his own. Similarly, any situation where a normative ethical theory provides an answer that is controversial is, rather than being a prescription, a flaw of the theory, by the very metric by which they are judged.

As an addendum to the discussion above, I should answer what is likely to be the curious reader's question: why pursue the creation of normative ethical theories at all? If they cannot prescribe, but can only explain our actions in terms of propositions, then what is the value? While it is certainly true that explaining complex things in simple terms (e.g. utilitarianism) is an intellectual and aesthetic achievement, this is certainly not the only motivation. The very pursuit of such theories belies a certain set of assumptions about the nature of things; namely, that the right set of propositions will not only explain what we already know but will be right more generally. While this mystical belief has proven itself many times in the natural sciences, its accuracy in philosophical questions (which tend to the human, semantic, and immeasurable) is very questionable. What is interesting is why this assumption is so fundamental to Western thought that it is indispensable: even in the face of millennia of lackluster results, it is still a widespread belief.

We begin with J.L. Austin's famous work “How to Do Things With Words,” which, despite its titular resemblance to “Why We Should Not Make Mean Log Of Wealth Big Though Years To Act Are Long,” does contain polysyllabic words, among which we find Austin's division of the “acts” of language. Austin defines these types of acts in opposition to the philosophy of language of the time, arising from Frege's notion of sense and reference. To the function of speech described by sense and reference (what we might first think of as the “meaning” of speech), Austin assigns the term locutionary. Then, as a manner of pointing out the incompleteness of this model, Austin introduces two new types of acts, illocutionary and perlocutionary, with which he hopes to classify the “otherness” of linguistic effects falling outside of the sense-reference model. For our purposes we can consider illocution and perlocution as one, calling it exlocution, since we intend to execute it through locution, and revealing the dichotomy within Austin's trichotomy. The first question we may ask of this locution/exlocution dichotomy is this: since the original model was found to be incomplete (sense-reference), what justification is there for defining a new model as an extension of the old, rather than building one anew? Luckily for patients, the medical establishment has not corrected the deficiency in bloodletting by sorting patients into “curable by bloodletting” and “not curable by bloodletting.” To examine this question we will watch how language squirms under the light of the model. Consider the Hollywood cliche: an adolescent girl, listening to Nirvana, is asked by her mother whether Tony will be coming over for dinner. “Yes,” the girl yells through her music, with audible sarcasm, “my boyfriend loves listening to you and dad fight.” Dissecting this in terms of locutionary acts and exlocutionary acts is simple. The locutionary act is in the girl's description of her boyfriend legitimately enjoying listening to here parent's quarrels. The exlocutionary acts are various: causing her mother to feel guilty, indicating that Tony will not come over for dinner, etc. This is an analysis with much intuitive appeal. But how does the girl use sarcastic intonation? Arguing that it is merely her anger seeping through is unsatisfactory: why would emotional variations alone reverse the meaning of the locutionary act? In fact, intonation patterns are not biologically innate, they are linguistic (or else tonal languages could not exist). Just as we are aware that this girl is an embodiment of a “sarcastic teen” cliche, she is also aware of the meaning, efficacy, and appropriateness of sarcasm through her own exposure to language. Similarly, her mother has had exposure to sarcasm as a linguistic artifact sufficiently to be aware of her daughter's intent (and in fact, if the mother is not an experienced English speaker, she might be confused by her daughter's retort). If we consider the mother's experience in interpretation we see that the locutionary content is not actually considered. Although a naive assessment might conjecture that the mother considers the hypothesis that her daughter's locutionary act is true and rejects it, these mental gymnastics are simply not necessary in working communication. Any mother with competent language skills will know from the first words of this sentence, from the tone alone, that Tony will not be coming to dinner. This is not merely through empathy, or an understanding of her daughter, but because sarcasm is a linguistic convention, used, stolen, and cliched like any other. We see in that example how some properties of speech are “privileged” in that they have locutionary content (e.g. the words used), whereas others are “deprivileged” in that they have purely exlocutionary content (e.g. intonation). This is an indication that the locutionary/exlocutionary model is not blind to the medium. It is worth noting that the vernacular for locutionary content is “literal meaning,” but even though this is a common word, it is worth investigating its meaning further. Let us hypothesize for a second, in light of the locutionary privilege of diction over intonation, that the locutionary content, or “literal meaning,” of speech is the meaning of the speech as it as written. This is suggested to us by the etymology of the word “literal,” which comes from the Latin litteralis (which means “of or pertaining to letters or writing”). The problem, of course, is that not all writing is actually literal, as readers of satirists like Swift and Twain can attest to. We could try to argue that it is not the speech as it is written, then, but the “conventional meaning” which determines the locutionary act. As we have seen, though, not all conventions (e.g. sarcastic intonation) are privileged in this way. We posit, then, that the notion of a locutionary act survives not as an orthogonal component of speech that is helpful in interpretation, but rather as an ideal of language, and more specifically an ideal of writing. The question, then, is of the origin and function of this ideal. To help elucidate how, exactly, the idea of literal meaning is really an ideal of literal meaning, we will consider a thought experiment. Imagine walking into a library, finding two canonized works of literature, and attempting to read one in the tone of the other. For instance, one might try to read “The Sun Also Rises” in the tone of “Lolita.” The task is not just impossible, it is meaningless and absurd. The tone of each work is inherent and unique to it (at least with respect to each reader). There is no such thing as “the bull of my life, the sun of my loins.” Similarly, reading any of these works in the “literal tone,” whatever that may be (perhaps the closest thing is that of a newspaper), is meaningless. To then consider any novel's acts as being a) that when read like with a particular tone and b) all other acts, is to use a taxonomy that is clearly very arbitrary. To return to the question posed above, what then is the origin and function of this ideal tone, the “literal tone?” To address this question we invert the world in which we work: instead of language dependent on philosophy we consider philosophy dependent on language, and we find that Philosophy (as an institution and a body of text) depends on its ability to unify the meaning of its works in pursuit of truth. If texts have irreconcilable meanings, then they are useless in concert. This is analogous to law (take contract law for example): the codification therein relies on its ability to have a single meaning determined by convention. To reiterate, we find that it is not that philosophy, by allowing us to extract the locutionary content from a text, gives us insight into how we interpret that text, but rather that Philosophy relies on the selection of some way of assigning meaning to a text with as little ambiguity as possible. This, then, makes clear the true scope of the function of the literal word: it is the bricks upon which the academy is built. This is why words are privileged over intonation: they can be written and are less ambiguous. We find here the opposite of Derrida's “phonocentrism.” This is graphocentrism; text is considered first by its usefulness with respect to the academic ideal and only secondly for its other effects.

“Je ne dis pas les choses parce que je les pense, je dis les choses pour ne plus les penser.” — Michel Foucault

“Children are simultaneously required to constitute themselves as autonomous subjects, responsible, free and conscious, and to constitute themselves as submissive, inert, obedient, conforming objects. The child resists on all levels, and to a contradictory demand he responds with a double strategy. To the demand of being an object, he opposes all the practices of disobedience, of revolt, of emancipation, in short, a total claim to subjecthood. To the demand of being a subject he opposes, just as obstinately, and efficaciously, an object's resistance, that is to say, exactly the opposite: childishness, hyperconformism, total dependence, passivity, idiocy.” — Jean Baudrillard

To Baudrillard's two aggressions I add a third, possible only under the tyranny of epidemiological signhood: the destruction of signification, and the second method of dissolving binary oppositions. Rather than signifying the intersection of the dual sets, we abstain from signifying to either set.

(The fourth aggression is the methodology: exorcism. Invocation “pour ne plus les penser.”)

This is the revolution of silence, the death of advertising, distinct from passivity, and more akin to a cat burglar's balance. In lieu of a comprehensive style guide, start your wardrobe with this: wear the last outfit you did not notice.