RE: [-empyre-] aLe --> Jorge Luiz Antonio

["Jim Andrews" <jim@vispo.com>]

> >. It doesn't help that there is a kind
> >of essentialism almost built into language itself,
>
> Bw: Essentialism is kind of Western nominalist tradition.
> Seems to me it has nothing to do with magical powers of word, an idea
> completely oposed to this, in my view.

Forgive me: I sense a common interest in these things, Lucio, so I could not
refrain from the below post; let me see if I can explain why I think
'essentialism' is not without involvement in magic, and a possible
philosophical attitude of concrete poetry to magic, essentialism, and
nominalism.

I am not much of a formal student of philosophy, but my conception of the
meaning of 'essentialism' and 'nominalism' is that they are largely
antithetical to one another. For instance, as I conceive it, 'essentialism'
postulates that there is something common to all proper uses of the word
'goodness', ie, 'essentialism' postulates that there exists 'goodness' or
'the good' and this would help us know the 'essence' of 'goodness', if it
existed. Whereas nominalism *denies* that just because we use the same word
for different things, there must be something common among the two things or
common to the meaning we imply in using the same word for the different
things. In other words, 'nominalism' does not necessarily accept the idea
that essences exist either at a linguistic or deeper level.

To give another example, an essentialist or idealist or platonist could
believe that ideals such as justice, beauty, truth, love, 1, infinity, and
so on, have an *actual* existence independent of humans and language, and
the existence of abstract ideals, while possibly at another level of being
such as the Ur of Plato's 'The Timaeus' or heaven or the land of the Spirits
or the realm of the Forms or whatever, is not simply as an idea in heads but
is at a level of existence independent of what anybody thinks of the ideal.
Whereas a nominalist could believe that ideals such as justice, beauty, etc
do not have any existence independent of ideas in peoples' heads, yet
nominalists can concede that ideals may be 'necessary fictions', ie, even
though they don't have any 'actual' existence, we could not live
thoughtfully without them.

Given that this is my conception of what 'essentialism' and 'nominalism' are
(or mean), you can see how I might ascribe to 'essentialism' a tendency to
admit the magical, at some level. Because once you suppose the actual
existence of abstract entities, they may as well be spirits or numbers or
moral entities or other ideas. And, more importantly, to suppose the actual
existence of abstract entities is not so much to 'confuse' the signifier
with the signified as to ascribe to the signifier a corresponding signified
entity which may not exist other than as an idea in one's head. In other
words, 'essentialism' is more amenable to admitting what may be phantoms as
actually existent entities. And it is crucial to magic that one believe in
the actual existence of ideals that have no corporeal existence.

Although I am inclined intellectually to nominalism, I recognize that life
would barely be livable without ideals. How far can law get without a notion
of justice, or art without a notion of beauty, or mathematics without
infinity? Nominalist, constructivist programs that do not admit the
existence of the actually infinite have been attempted in mathematics with
less than full-bodied results. In other words, these programs, ironically
enough, do not yield a body of mathematics sufficiently rich to give us
tools to deal with all the practical mathematical problems we encounter. We
just can't get very far without granting the existence of at least a few
necessary fictions.

And language is full of them. Language can barely be used without implicitly
postulating the actual existence of ideals. After all, a 'stone' is not a
particular rock but signifies an ideal, abstract class, as do all words,
however poorly defined the class is. And language and its rules of
construction make no explicit distinction between how we use ideal classes
in sentences and more quotidian classes like 'stones', so we habitually
speak in phantoms and fantasms before we have finished a paragraph.
Consequently, a certain amount of 'essentialism' is not simply a heritage of
platonism but of language itself.

Hence the simplicity to which concrete aspired is not so simple. It isn't
necessarily 'deceptively' simple, but language just is not simple. It is not
concrete. It is abstract. It is as abstract as mathematics when it comes to
ideals, just less logical. The language of mathematics is child's play in
its complexity compared with the complexity of natural language and its
capacity to invoke multi-fold imaginaries at every turn. The domain of
poetry is richer than the domain of mathematics: it includes mathematics as
a subset, for the domain of poetry ranges over all language, cannot be
confined narrowly.

Concrete does not necessarily ask us to suppose that language is simple. It
can operate via a kind of building up and simplifying of complexity via its
invocations of the materiality of language and playing those invocations
against or with the inherant abstraction of language toward an experience
poised explosively between the concrete and the abstract, toward the
'resolution of opposites' which, like infinity, may or may not go on before
our eyes. When we crack language open, matter and energy resolve in the
source. Concrete introduces more dimensions into language, all the better to
crack language open.

I mentioned in an earlier post that FM Cornford said the basis of
sympathetic magic is 'confusion of the thing with the symbol for the thing.'
This is not an esoteric 'confusion' to which only the superstitious or
mystical are prone. We routinely assume the actual existence of abstract
entities simply to get from point A to point B in language. The centipede
does not count its legs when it walks and would get nowhere if it did.
Similarly, we rarely stop to count the phantoms and fantasms we invoke in a
single paragraph without a second thought. In such an inner world, which we
all have, where 'reality' and 'fantasy' are coextensive, confusion of the
thing with the symbol for the thing is simply a routine experience. Magic is
not an esoteric thing reserved for mages but is an everyday experience in
our habitual twilight between the concrete and abstract.

The fantastic and phenomenological in South American new media is rich in
its acknowledgement of the secret congruence of reality and fantasy and in
its acknowlegement, as Regina says, of "the curiosity that human beings have
and which makes them search for reason, invention and truth for their
existence."

ja