Karatani and the Archive

Karatani's post-colonial amendment to the Kantian question of beauty posits that what is really at work is "bracketing," or the process of separating, or pushing aside, certain issues to focus on a few in particular. Specifically, aestheticentricism happens when a person or a group looks at one culture by bracketing their people, their lifestyle, and their other contributions solely to examine their art. A colonizing culture often will forget to "unbracket" the colonized culture, minimizing their importance to that of their aesthetic contributions.

I'd like to examine the idea of bracketing and unbracketing when it comes to a quote from Spivak. Spivak inserts herself into the archive by telling the story of her experience searching for the Rani, and on page 239, claims, "Unlike the archives, where the past is already digested as the raw material for history writing, the past here is a past of memory, which constitutes something differently in different subjects interconnecting." She goes on to say that her Rani "can be invoked," and is at the "shadow-border of the prehistory of this colonial/postcolonial (dis)continuity," but that she cannot be "commemorated" (240). Spivak distinguishes, then, between the past of the archive, of the physical, scholarly iteration of the past, and the memory. In fact, it is the archive which has already been "digested," or interpreted, processed until it fits within the dominant discourse. But memory cannot be fit into the hegemonic discourse in the same way. It is interconnected, not digestible in the same way. This is how the Rani remains. And in that sense, memory avoids bracketing. Memory's interconnectivity makes it unable to be bracketed successfully; it is impossible to simplify and restrict the memory, cultural or individual.

The archive, however, is where the issue is truly raised. The archive is bracketing incarnate-- it has already been bracketed before one has the chance to do it oneself. The archive then already enacts aestheticentricism and already enacts a colonizing force upon the reader. It must be, then, through memory that we avoid bracketing, simplifying cultures to their aesthetic or other contributions. Memory "invokes" the other against the hegemonic discourse, and in some way, may give the subaltern a brief representation against the voicelessness perpetuated by the archive. 

Thoughts on Spivak. Analyses and Questions

First, the first sentence. “If by our old-fashioned reckoning philosophy concentrates and literature figures, feminist historiography excavates.” I had no idea where she was going this until I returned to it after reading substantial parts of the chapter. I think what she is driving at here is that “feminist historiography” has cannot work in the general terms (“concentrative” and “figural”) that philosophy and literature have worked in. This makes some sense: since feminist historiography as a “new” field would need to “extract” data about women from the strata of historicized material, which will of course be a rather masculine substance (i.e. history is made up of men’s stories, we have to go digging for women’s stories beneath the surface.)

            Nevertheless, I am struggling to understand this first sentence as a rhetorical move. She writes “old-fashioned” pejoratively—presumably because these are overgeneralizations—yet she inscribes (what I’m assuming to be) her own work within this class of over-generalizations. As if she says “well these fields have over-generalized themselves, I’ll overgeneralize myself too!” Odd move, I think, especially when what I understood from the piece is that she wants to bring attention to the fact that discourses come predetermined with their own damning sets of overgeneralizations which efface local discourse. (On this note, I’m curious if anyone knows how she is different than Foucault in this sense.)

Next, a suggestion for looking at two pages which seemed fairly central to me, 238 and 239. I think this complicated piece can be fairly well summed up with a quote from 238: “Of what is history made as it happens? Of the differed-deferred “identity” of people in the deferred-differed “unity” of actions?” I find this quote insightful. History has to operate by means of a generalized cause and effect that is always specious, i.e. Hitler caused World War II. Furthermore, history erroneously lumps together people’s as well: “All Germans wanted to exterminate the Jews.” Still, I want to identify a potential paradox that which embodies my general critique of this kind of post-colonial thinking. Essentially, I don’t see the post-colonial space as a special locus for this kind of historical discourse violence. What would be a case where the historicizing of collected information not constructed in this way? I find it good that we are discussing these third-world, post-colonial spaces, especially the minorities therein, such as women, but I have trouble seeing them as special cases.

Outline of Stuart Hall "West and the Rest".

Blogger keeps losing or messing up the format when I paste from Word. For the formatted version please see here. Sorry about that! -Bo

1. Introduction
1.1. WHERE AND WHAT IS "THE WEST"? 185
I. "East" and "West" often mystified, not really about place and georaphy.
II. While we use these terms for the sake of simplicity, they are really complex terms. Complications:
A. The West is more than Europe, and not all Europe are the West.
1. eg. Eastern Europe, Japan.
III. The West is a historical, not geographical construct.
A. Definition of "western": a developed, industriliazed, urbanized, capitalist, secular and modern society.
1. Thus West=Modern 186
IV: The function of the concept of "the West".
A. allows us to characterize societies into categories: i.e. "western" "non-westerN"; a tool that set certain structure of thoughts in motion.
B. It is a condensed image, a composite picture; as part of a representation system.
1. It's a system because it relates to other imgeas and ideas: wester=urban=developed; non-western=non-industrial=rural=agricultural=under-developed.
C. As a standard for comparison: thus non-western can be said to be close to or far from the West.
D. A criterion of evaluation.
1. ex. The west=developed=good=desirable; the non-wester=under-develped=bad=undesirable.
2. Thus it functions as ideology, that is, producing certain knowledge about a subject and an attidues towards it.
V: The West is a historical concept, but not simply represent, but being essential to the very formation of the Western societies. 187
VI: It is not only an idea: it had real effects. It enabled people to see and speak about things.
VII: This chapter is to analyze the formation of the representation system who centers around the concept of "the West" and "the Rest”
VIII: West and Enlightenment
A. West idea central to Enlight.
IX: The rise of the West as a global story; The West and the Rest two sides of the same coin; the West as the negative definition of the east.
X: Internal differece within the West; internal other (Jew)
2. EUROPE BREAKS OUT
2.1 WHEN AND HOW DID EXPANSION BEGIN 189
I. Two key events for expansion: Early Portuguese in Africa (1430); Columbus (1492)
2.2. FIVE MAIN PHASES
I. Exploration
II: Early contact: conquest, settlement, colonization, etc.
III: establishment of permanent exploitation, settlement and colonization. IV: The climax for global scramble for colonies; apex of imperialism.
V: Present (1990), formally independent, but economically dependent on the west.
2.3 THE AGE OF EXPLORATION; 15C [PHASE 1]
2.4 BREAKING THE FRAME; end of 15c [PHASE 2]
I. Material factor
II. Mental condition
2.5 THE CONSEQUENCES OF EXPANSION FOR THE IDEA OF THE WEST 197
I. The concept of the West consolidated to erase the intenal difference through opposition to the East, esp. the Islamaic
II. The Restless 198
A. Weber: Rational restlessness derived from Puritanism; moral & social improvement 199a
B. Durkheim: a community of norm based on Christendom; internal political, economical, class struggles regulated.
III. Map 200
IV. The concept of Europe as a half-secularized version of the Chritian religion charged concept f"West"; 201

3 DISCOURSE AND POWER 201
3.1 WHAT IS A DISCOURSE 201
I. Def: a particularway to define West and the Rest, and their relation
II. Discourse and statement: field of statements, enable and limits possible statments about certain subject. III: Discourse as production of knowledge and the complication of thought/action, language/practice
1. Interaction: practices entail meaning; discourse produces action IV: Keys of Foucaultdian discourse 202
A. Discourse and subject position
1. Discourse independent of where it is issued, can be produced by individuals in different institutions
2. Yet discourse produces subject positions from which the discourse makes sense
ex. when you speak in terms of West and the Rest, you are placed in a subject position enabled by
certain discourse about it.
B: Discourses are not closed system; i.e. it's more a selection and connection among certain elements available
1. It may contains elements form elsewhere in space and time; ex. Christendom in the discourse of the
West
C: the discourse regulates the differential relationship among statmenets; acts of discursive formation
3.2 DISCOURSE AND IDEOLOGY 202
I. Differnce
A. Ideology based on polarity of falsity and truthfulness; discourse focus on how true and false are
constructed discursively. 203
1. ex. calling them terrorists and then treating them as such; description becomes true
3.3 CAN A DISCOURSE BE INNOCENT? 233
A. Discourse must not be directly linked to class interest;
B. and yet it's not power neutral.
1. necessary epistemological violence 204
2. serving ulterior motive and interests
3. yet even the practitioners can be unaware of it; thus not attributable simply to evil intentions.
4. West in a dominant position, dictating what the others see and didn't see.
C. Thus discourse as ONE system through which power circulates.
D. A functioning discourse is called a "regime of truth."
4. REPRESENTING THE OTHER
4.1 ORIENTALISM 205
4.2 THE "ARCHIVE" 206
I. Orientalism as a common archive bound together by set of ideas and values for explaining the East.
II. Other discourses "Orientalism" discourse draws on:
A. Classical Knowledge
ex. from Plato to Ptolemy
B. Religious and biblical sources 207
C. Mythology
D. Travellers' tales
4.3 A "REGIME OF TRUTH" 208
I. Rise of descriptive and observative projects but its calims to truth also compromised
A. ex. patagones
4.4 IDEALIZATION 209
I. the Orient and the Rest as the subject of fantasy, dream a Goden Age, and Utopia.
4.5 SEXUAL FANTASY 210
4.6 MIS-RECOGNIZING DIFFERENCE 211
I. The West's inability to recognize difference, such as economic, social structures foreign to their own.
4.7 RITUALS OF DEGRADATION 210
I. The opposite of idealization: the Rest as the barbarous and depraved; cannibalism
4.8 SUMMARY: STEREOTYPES, DUALISM, AND SPLITTING 215
I. Idealization, projection of desire and degradation, failure to recognize difference, and the imposition of
Eurocentric norms are all strategies of STEREOTYPING 215 6 IN THE BEGINNING ALL THE WORLD WAS AMERICA 216
5 FROM "THE WEST AND THE REST" TO MODERN SOCIOLOGY 221
I. The influence of the oriental discourse on the foundation of modern sociology
A. Marx and Asiatic production.
B. Weber and Islam
7 CONCLUSION

Lessons Learned

Starting this new unit, I wondered at the abrupt transition from the Age of Enlightenment theory to those theories situated outside what is understood as the West. My little experience with the theory of the “Rest” made me question whether the connection between the two would be an obvious one, and then, to my delight, this week’s readings effectively bridged the divide between “Western” theory and the theory of the “Rest”. Karatani and Kohso argue that the tendency towards aestheticentrism, or focusing exclusively on a culture’s aesthetic cultural offerings and “bracketing” the rest, such as theoretical traditions or socio-political or even ethical arguments, is a legacy from Western tradition. Yet, this appreciation for the aesthetic can be traced back to the Romantic, a time when the West turned eastward to feed its dreams and notions of utopia with the unknown just beyond the Schwelle (threshold).

Not only did this week’s readings satisfy my need to draw connections,  they also served as a cautionary guide for my future research. According to Stuart Hall, the West-Rest/East binary was established to help create a discourse for understanding and talking about the other. Yet, history proved the difficulty of making distinctions between self and the other without necessarily equating difference with superiority of self. This tendency led to self-entitled colonization/domination of the world by the Western-European elite forces of Spain, Portugal, England, France, etc. 
In my research, I’ll be looking closely at literature written by non-Western authors in a Western language. The need to talk about what I’m finding, to create a rhetoric for describing how this literature differs from that written by native (L1) speakers echoes the initial need that created the East-West distinction. Whereas the East-West binary ultimately led to the suppression of the other in favor of the West, I’ll need to take care not to perpetuate any undervaluation of the other, L2 literature, when making comparisons to my previously assumed norm, L1 literature. 
Karatani and Kohso also talked about Kant’s bracketing, that is, excluding those things that disturb the aesthetic appreciation of a country’s cultural offerings (socio-economic factors, displeasure, etc.). I was going to look at the space between L1 and L2 as a romantic space, one with the potential for creativity and utopia. But to look at this with strictly a Western understanding of both these aspects would be to bracket the socio-cultural background of the author and deprive the discussion of vital depth. 

The solution to this dilemma is integrating Spivak’s proposal of viewing Europe (the West) as an other when reading, analyzing and discussing my texts. I hope my outsider perspective, being a non-native speaker of German, will provide enough distance from my subject to allow me to approach both the German and the other “Other” cultures as being equal in value, though different in constitution; the readings this week already served their purpose in opening my eyes to my inherent bias. 

Questions/points of discussion

• ·      I’d like to discuss the qualities of the “evidence” Hall discusses – a kind of text that seems to lie at the heart of the power of the discourse he’s laying out, and lies at the intersection of conceptions of “fact” and “fiction.” Are there aesthetic and affective characteristics of such evidence (particularly given Kojin’s examination of the aesthetic qualities, or bracketing processes, of a category)? Two moments in the text:

o   (208) “The point of recounting this astonishing mixture of fact and fantasy which constituted late medieval ‘knowledge’ of other worlds is not to poke fun at the ignorance of the Middle Ages. The point is: (a) to bring home how these very different discourses, with variable statuses as ‘evidence,’ provided the cultural framework through which the peoples, places, and things of the New World were seen, described, and represented; and (b) to underline the conflation of fact and fantasy that constituted ‘knowledge.’”

o   (215) Stereotyped Characteristics become the sign, the ‘evidence’ by which the subject is known.

• ·      Hall’s expansion enables us to recognize the discursive structure/power/logic of Orientalism in colonialism and other global dynamics more broadly (i.e., why Orientalism is such an important book for Latin Americanists). But what are the benefits and pitfalls of developing such a sweeping hermeneutic for understanding Western civilization and nearly all modes of philosophical and scholarly thinking? Is Spivak’s metareflective writing is a critical mode of breaking into this pattern, rather than the development of another monolithic rule of law that explains the world Perhaps his final turning of the question back on modern sociology itself points to why he’s making a sweeping claim as an intervention.

• ·      What might be the relationship between Spivak’s project and the demonstration of Said’s “critical consciousness”? Though challenging to More than delineating a practice, she seems to be modeling one that draws together and into tension multiple legacies of critical approaches and problematics in her reading of the British response to Sati, and “peripheral” lives with dominant global forces…ultimately a demonstrative project of the ethics of writing the history of “the other.”

Reading Notes & Questions

Karatani

• Simon vs. Oe, Simon representative of the “West” aestheticizing Japan. “Respect” Japan's culture and art but does not want to view Japan as Western equivalent (modern, daily lives), Japan as other
• Kant's aesthetic theory, contradictory sets of true/false, ethical, taste
• Interest-economic value vs. art for art's sake
• Sublime & modern science. Science mentioned quite a bit -how does this relationship work?
• Brackets- Karatani doesn't seem to explicitly define this
• Art is the subjective act of bracketing other concerns
• Art exists not as object but in the consideration of object as art, disinteredness
• Pleasure not from object but bracketing reactions to object
• Aestheticism
• Praises object uncomfortable and shunned in daily life, sublime
• What is his definition of aesthete?
• Aesthetic vs. industrial (“real”)
• Unbracketing
• Unbracketing Othello-what are consequences of unbracketing art? If we unbracket race, are we judging Othello based on its racial treatments? (Achebe reading of Conrad) “Valid” way to read literature?
• “Okakura's act demonstrates that the disinterestedness that allows us to acknowledge artistic beauty can be achieved only by the same sort of change of stance (bracketing) that takes place in the natural sciences.” - What does this mean, what is the relationship he draws between arts and sciences?
• Aestheticicentrism forgets to unbracket, art should be process of bracketing and unbracketing?

Hall

• Idea of “the West” not only bounded by geography, historical construct. West = modern, an idea
• Dichotomies, “binary oppositions fundamental to all linguistic and symbolic systems and to the production of meaning itself”
• “the West” is different from “the Rest”, “the Rest” from “the West” though they can all be internally different as well
• Discourse: “Particular way of representing the West and the Rest, group of statements which provide a language for talking about a particular kind of knowledge about a topic
• Production of knowledge through language
• Produced by practice
• Innocent discourse (ideologically innocent)? Outside of power
• West/Rest discourse cannot be innocent because of unequal power structures
• Gendered  

Spivak

• “Europe as an Other”
• Archive and literature (which is privileged?) “Colonizer constructs himself as he constructs the colony”
• Dominick LaCapra: “experimental criticism remains on level of delicate miniatures”-What does this mean?
• Establish intimate relationship between literary and colonial
• “Worldling of a world”
• References to Victorian literature-why?
• What kind of critical work is Spivak's “History” chapter?

Can't get away from Kant

-Kojin Karatani discusses “aestheti-centrism,” viewing an object, person, culture, etc. with disinterest for anything except aesthetic appreciation. An aestheticentrist brackets off all other concerns. “However, the characteristic of the aestheticentrists is that they forget to remove the brackets. They confuse the reality of the other with what is achieved by bracketing. Or they confuse their respect for beauty with respect for the other.” (153) Karatani's critique is centered around Kant's aesthetic theory of disinterestedness. How would utilizing Hanah Arendt's theory of political judgment alter/re-shape Karatani's argument? I am not overly familiar with Arendt's work, but when reading selections from Kant's third critique for the last section of 503 I recalled that she uses the third critique as the basis for her theory of political judgment. In the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article on Arendt, Maurizio Passerin d'Entreves explains that “it is only in Kant's Critique of Judgment that we find a conception of judgment as the ability to deal with particulars in their particularity, that is, without subsuming them under a pre-given universal, but actively searching the universal out of the particular.” With this in mind, in reference to last week's readings about mis-reading and misunderstanding, could we claim that aestheticentrists have misunderstood Kant's aesthetic philosophy? Or does his philosophy contain the possibility for both readings?

-Karatani's discussion about bracketing led me to reflect on Maha Marouan's luncheon talk last week. She mentioned how in the novel Tituba talking about her powers is meant to be a parody of her helplessness in real life. Maryse Condé gives a comic representation of Tituba as having supernatural powers. At the same time, Marouan said it is important to remember that there is a serious discourse in Condé's, that the novel contains both serious concern and parody. How might reading both of these elements in the novel illustrate a dynamic process of bracketing and unbracketing? How might the fact that Condé's husband translated the novel “to fit her into the European canon” relate to this idea of bracketing?

- Stuart Hall on the depiction of the “New World”: “At a moment's notice, Paradise could turn into 'barbarism.' Both versions of the discourse operated simultaneously. They might seem to negate each other, but it is more accurate to think of them as mirror-images. Both were exaggerations, founded on stereotypes, feeding off each other. Each required the other. They were in opposition, but systematically related.” (214) I keep running across descriptions of women as houris in the literature I am reading, for example, Wollstoncraft, Lippard's Quaker City, Pickney The Young Carolinians. This idea of the poles of Paradise and Hell (barbarism) as mirror-images is a useful concept when formulating feminist critiques of this literature, and in light of this concept, I want to reformulate my critique of Wollstoncraft (see my blog post on her). On the houris in Paradise Quran 52:20, “They will be reclining on thrones lined up, and We will marry them to fair women with large, [beautiful] eyes.” Other references are at Q 44:54; 55:72; 56:22.

Notes on Karatani's "Uses of Aesthetics"

“Okakura, with Fenollosa, uncovered the statue Kannon… as art. Previously, it had been hidden in a section of Horyuji Temple called Yumedono for centuries. The whole history of Asia is stylistically condensed in this sculpture.”  

--Kojin Karatani, “Uses of Aesthetics: After Orientalism” (pg. 156)

This quote particularly struck me as an illustration of Karatani’s point, in his article, “Uses of Aesthetics: After Orientalism.” He details the danger of “bracketing”[1] (because it then becomes very difficult to “un-bracket”). He criticizes that aestheticism recognizes only the intriguing, exotic, ornate, and beautiful of another culture—simply another form of orientalism, bracketed into a disillusioned “respect.” In the quote above, Karatani reveals, in action, aestheticism’s failure to “unbracket”: “The whole history of Asia stylistically condensed in this sculpture”—really? The whole history of Asia? And how do you know the idol is art in the first place? According to Okakura, the statue was art; according to those who originally made and kept it, the statue was a holy figure of the temple, not a piece for museum exhibition (“the statue had been the object of religious awe rather than artistic worship” [pg. 157]).  In coining the statue as ‘art,’ although he praised it with the highest admiration, he decontextualized its intended worth, and became a colonialist by assigning foreign interpretation and significance. Though perhaps unaware, he still completely missed a non-European-centered view of this culture; his conception of art was assigned to their world. Regardless of whether the makers had intended it to be art or not, it became art by Okakura’s notion of what art entails. This seems a form of benign imperialism—but imperialism all the same. Instead of approaching a culture with the mentality to hear from its real individuals, we approach with the mentality to assign to its whole what we’ve already heard. In a selfish form of esteem, we pull evidence to fill our established bracket of the “foreign,” and get from it an intensified interest and admiration—which, of course, brings us personal enjoyment. Karatani here critiques the unbalanced non-recognition of individuals. He states that no side—western or otherwise—should dominate; rather, social awareness should guide when to “bracket” and when to not, leading to a balanced appreciation of other cultures, and recognition of each individual’s validity as a real, individual human being.  

---

[1] Internalizing an object’s identity based upon what that object’s identity is assigned to be, and therefore “bracketing” other feelings normally associated with it  (pg. 151). We find pleasure—based on the Kantian idea of our interaction with objects—in “bracketing” normally negative or uncomfortable connotations; the greater the “bracket,” the greater the pleasure. (“The act of bracketing displeasure gives pleasure on another level…For instance, an evil that calls for ethical opposition can offer pleasure in the subjective project of bracketing the ethical concern. For this reason, aestheticism rather needs evil or abjection…The aesthetic stance, or aestheticism, gets pleasure not from its object, but by bracketing various reasons to the object.”) (pg. 151)

Interpretation or mis-reading?

I am puzzling over the line between re-interpretation and mis-reading/mis-understanding. On what does the decision that something is a re-interpretation, a positive intellectual enterprise, and not a mis-reading/mis-understanding, a negative intellectual enterprise, rest? What power structures are at play in these decisions?

Dabashi:

“It is precisely that self-confidence, that self-consciousness, that audacity to think yourself the agent of history that enables a thinker to think his particular thinking is 'Thinking' in universal terms, and his philosophy 'Philosophy' and his city square 'The Public Space', and thus he a globally recognised Public Intellectual.
There is thus a direct and unmitigated structural link between an empire, or an imperial frame of reference, and the presumed universality of a thinker thinking in the bosoms of that empire.”

This passage comes after he comments on Gramsi mis-quoting Kant. (Gramsci: “Kant's maxim 'Act in such a way that your conduct can become a norm for all men in similar conditions.'”) Although this idea of mis-quoting is pertinent to my reflections , I do not want to deal directly with Gramsci and Kant, instead I want to focus on Dabashi's comment about the audacity of thinking your “particular thinking is 'Thinking' in universal terms.” How is this audacity related to the line that is drawn between positive re-interpretation and negative mis-reading?

Hogan:

“As is well known, the Arab theorists simply misunderstood Aristotle on a number of points, due primarily to inadequate translations and to the different literary traditions of Greece and the Arab world. However, what is not well known is that they developed a subtle and illuminating analysis of the ethical import of literature, in many ways anticipating Romantic developments in Europe eight centuries later.” (p.4)

None of the “Arab theorists” he mentions (Ibn Sina, Ibn Rushd, and al-Farabi) were actually Arab, but that oversight aside, does this comment not fall into the trap of Dabashi's audacity of thinking? The theorists “simply misunderstood” Aristotle, but that is okay because they anticipated the Romantics. Why is it so important to emphasize misunderstanding instead of describing it as a “unique interpretation”? For the purposes of the article why mention it at all? (Not to mention the fact that some of the Romantics were influenced by Arabic and Persian literature.)

I want to end with a passage from Said's Orientalism:

“...but the rules of the logic by which a green fern in one society is a symbol of grace and in another is considered maleficent are neither predictably rational or universal. There is always a measure of the purely arbitrary in the way the distinctions between things are seen. And with these distinctions go values whose history, if one could unearth it completely, would probably show the same measure of arbitrariness.” (53-4)

Obvious green ferns and interpretation/misunderstanding are very different things, but I think this passage is relevant to the questions I have been raising and the other passages I have highlighted. We are again brought back to the question of the audacity of thinking my particular thought is of a universal nature. To conclude these thoughts I will re-iterate one of the questions I raised at the beginning of this post: What power structures are at play when distinguishing between re-interpretation and mis-reading/mis-understanding? How do we deal with these power structures if we want claim that something is not a mis-reading/mis-understanding, that it deserves to be analyzed as more than that?

A few notes on Dabashi and Gramsci

Dabashi

1. The nameless other

“thinkers that have actually earned the dignity of a name”

“What about thinkers outside the purview of these European philosophers; how are we to name an designate and honour and learn from them with the epithet of ‘public intellectual’ in the age of globalized media?”

The concept of a “public intellectual” requires the dignity of a name. This is also a matter of language: will we, for example, lose the fear of mispronouncing names in other languages in order to create that dignity, honor, and designation?

2. The center of the universe

“Where do they fit in?”

The center as fictive/colonial act. Political, historical, and literary responsibility of adjusting the scale? Also, “unmitigated structural link”: how are structure and scale connected (I’m thinking here also about our reading of Kant and the measurement of beauty and the sublime.)

(Also HOGAN: “before European colonialism” (1); colonialism, modernity, globalization and the creation of a center.

3. Writing and knowledge

“That goes without saying, for without that confidence and self-consciousness these philosophers and the philosophical traditions they represent can scarce lay any universal claim on our epistemic credulities, nor would they be able to put pen to paper or finger to keyboard and write a sentence.” Question of writing as epistemology and information/knowledge?

Gramsci

1. Umwelt

"Everyone acts according to his culture, that is the culture of his environment" (364)

Question of semiotics and communication. Individuality and self-centeredness in a globalized Welt and Umwelt. 

2. Science and skepticism

"Its original meaning was that of 'science of ideas,' and since analysis was the only method recognized and applied by science it means 'analysis of ideas,' that is, 'investigation of the origin of ideas." (375)

What makes a method scientific? (Thinking about Galilei and reasoning as basis of scientific proof) How do we analyze?