createven education

The process has been covertly creative—for every theory presented in grad school I pretended an alliterative, studied performance as if upon a stage. Values-theory and aesthetics have merged into a purpose at once artistic and intellectual; they are conflicted as to which extreme I point. Arendt introduced me to the thought control of totalitarianism, which must be set above fascism for the pure repetitive constraint of the subject’s thought, the crippling logic in one of two ideological stances. In one, nature is embodied by the state and it must be furthered—nurtured—by the master race; in the other, history is finally to fulfill itself by actuating the giant nothing, the end of conflict (the key problem solved by the state). At last I saw Nazis and Stalinists at the level of logical thinking, I considered the reasons why they had to be obeyed…

Political science was a way to study moral philosophy, with MacIntyre owning most of the final scene, Arendt falling in the middle of Locke and Rousseau, debt and ownership to liberty, onward to freedom—until we reached Rawls and veils of ignorance which began to look strangely decorative when they were only meant for setting up hypothetical states.

Thereafter American liberalism took on bleak forms as political boundaries shrank: Rawls sought to eliminate the personal, private, that which is specific to a non-repeatable individual unit. Many—particularly Mouffe—have asked if there is a way out of this state of effacement. Isn’t it merely a quest for invisible liberty, even if expressed precisely in Rawls’ dry tone, this strictly logical attempt to structure a state permanently? For when we remove the veil of ignorance we resume our title, be it low or exemplary; we’re never absolved of personality. We get our wallets back and cannot help knowing where we stand and from that, how others stand. To the best possible effect on their stations, we arrange society to maximize the general good, along well-defined lines, from that neutral place of valence so that while I have as much as possible, so do you, though still less than me. After all, we cannot just dream a theory of total equality and general ownership! Rawlsian liberalism prevents such forgetting: someone always has what the other lacks.

And then there was Foucault, Derrida et al. What was before a case for European universalism fell to the next wave and everything dissolved, especially the underlying thread, the backdrop of superiority in learned and artistic discourse. Suddenly everything was the empty transcendental signified, Europe falling off its high horse: every simple aesthetic pleasure was stripped of innocence. With Eagleton running the show, beauty was a distraction from the political and was therefore always used politically, to distract while Reason was employed far more dangerously to obfuscate crucial economic realities. Naturally, capitalism uses the best of us against us…

All this began to fade, however, when Dolores returned to Alterity.