keys to our present predicament, my friend, ally, mother, father, lover ...

 

Among my keys for understanding our curious epistemological existential situation, I like those I can find in William James’ most out of there book, Essays in Radical Empiricism. The “radical” in the book is about expanding the timid empiricists notion of experience, which is still slotted into the subject and there pitched against an experienced object, to something more like the whole of what possibly is. Experience is the field, be it of quanta or the big bang. It is the material of the possible.

James first disposes of consciousness in the first chapter – a breathtaking demolition job – and set to work in the second chapter to build up this world of pure experience.

In James’ terms, one of  the great problems for philosophers (and lovers and voters and drivers of cars in traffic jams and thieves and cops) is this:

“My experiences and your experiences are “with each other in  various external ways, but mine pass into mine and yours pass into yours in a way in which your and mine never pass into one another” (in this prose I can hear the sounds of James’ great pupil, Gertrude Stein, who gets the tune, here).

To understand this routing problem – and in James, the method of the route, of going from one place to another, is always the metaphysical mother – James considers, in the tradition, the problem of knowing itself. James is a triadic man (just as Decartes is an either/or warrior, and Deleuze is a fourfold riddler), and he puts his problem like this: “Either the knower and the known are:

1.       The self-same piece of experience taken twice over in different contexts; or they are

2.       Two pieces of actual experience belonging to the same subject, with definite tracts of conjunctive transitional experience between them; or,

3.       The known is possible experience either of that subject or another, to which said conjunctive transitions would lead, if sufficiently prolonged. “

The solution now stands out to me like a star, a malevolent star, casting its light on what, to my old eyes, looks like the world transformed by media: the word as entirely the product of the mediate. The world as fandom – always knowing all about, but never ‘knowing’. In the sense of know in the phrase “I know him” or “She knows me”. My acquaintance, my friend, my mother, my father, my sibling, my lover. Where the tacit dimension of the self is included in the mix.

James makes his first move in explaining type one by invoking the kind of knowledge he calls “knowledge of”.

Knowledge of is research knowledge. Or search knowledge. That browsers respond to whatever one puts in the box with “searches” seems to have become, or even was from the beginning, a sort of social instinct, an unquestioned us of the term that presupposes a certain intentional looking or journey. The intention in the journey is to find, to fill in, some implicative object, some correct answer on the fill in the choices test. The search, in Jamesian speak, reproduces the perceptive act. We see, we touch, we hear, we browse.

What this world does without is … the dream of transcendental union, the “immediate touch of one by the other.” James imagines his adversary dismayed that we have moved among “mere intermediaries” and have left no room, have squeezed out, the transcendental glory of “apprehension”, ‘ in the etymological sense of the word, a leaping of the chasm as by lighting…” That image! James is, indeed, proposing a deflating, a de-sublimating image of the world as a compound of “mere intermediaries” – all ands, to what purpose we do not know, and as we get used to it, do not care. A world of only connect, no matter what the connection conveys.

I can imagine James’ adversary saying, producing that old cliché like the canniest poetry, that the map is not the territory. Routes are not the whole. But in fact that map and the territory are linked the way the shovel and the hole dug in the ground are linked, parts of an experience that extends beyond them. Maps change the territory, they reconfigure the territory. The charts that led Columbus to the New World, the chart which leads the ships through the supposedly eternal currents and predictable winds,  led to the decimation of the natives, the chopping down of the forests, the slave ships extracting human beings flavivirus and plasmodium falciparum from one continent to another, the extraction of oil and coal and the subsequent warming of the atmosphere and the oceans and the surprisingly quick shifts in the currents that Columbus encountered. It all happens in the blink of a geological eye. The map is not a description of the territory, but a symptom of the change that the territory will undergo, and us with it.

Keys. If they are keys.