We are lucky. We live in an era of enlightenment and
rationality, we left behind superstition and myths, or most of all. And we are
in sight of leaving the last ones for good. After many centuries, we are able
to see the real meanings behind religion stories or other anthropic compulsive
behavior. Surely violence and oppression won’t be automatically eliminated,
but at least we can see that the primeval forces that are pushing us to commit these
crimes as the constructs of our anthropological heritage. We can pat each other
on the back, we made it, the human kind is one step from understanding…Inspire
and be proud.
Now, enjoy this excitement, because the next words could be
something of a disappointment. In fact we are actually in a position to make
even the last step, to dissolve the last myth. After the discovery that behind
ethical and moral dogmas, behind superstitious and scientific explanation, we
finally know that real meanings stand for something else. OK. Well the last point is that meanings are
empty. That it is our faith in giving significance that things have sense. It’s
not that we attribute the wrong value or that we apply the wrong measurement.
No, it’s different. Surely you can try to square your meanings and your habits
in different ways, maybe Zeus and Ares and Aphrodite are better explained by
biopolitics and natural resources needs. Sure. We are playing a game where we
discover new lands. And we are very happy when a new, unchartered territory becomes
available and we discharge a cascade of hermeneutics and interpretation, to
find the appropriate words to describe it. And of course we deploy files of
soldiers to impose our version to others. But we always forget that meanings
are not there.
Meanings are invented, fabricated by our own creativity. Out
there, there is no significance. It is our will to believe that gives birth and
shapes the description of things. But then we couldn’t really play with our own
puppets until we know that they are our own puppets. So we need to fall in a
state of oblivion and pretend that out there what we encounter has a meaning
for us. Reality check means that your agency finds the friction with the real
thing.
Now we are definitely experiencing pain and pleasure. When
you bleed, when you are starving, yes you are really in a state of
debilitation. Your brain is pushing the button: do something or we are in deep
shit. But between the physical, empiric real shit and the world as we created,
well there is the ocean of bullshit we told ourselves. Oh sorry, is that too
crude? Let me be more French, more digestible. Between your guts and the
persona that you experience to be, there is the stream of narrations that other
established around you and you carved out of your biography.
So nice. So post-modern. And so poser. Because either we
speak just because from morning till down if you are not chased by a predator,
there is a lot of time to play with dolls. Or we really mean what we say and
when we acknowledge that our signifying is empty, we have a semiotic heart
attack.
What shall we do? A classic one is to hang yourself.
Seriously. That’s a good move, think to Foster Wallace or Pavese: they
encountered the limits of language and they couldn’t go further with their will
of significance. Interestingly no philosopher ever killed himself for this
reason. The only thinkers who killed themselves are Seneca and Socrates, for exactly
the opposite reason: to affirm the reality of their specific, individual,
characteristic will of significance. But in all the post-modern tradition,
everyone is happy and alive.
That’s an implicit confirmation that philosophy is
useless, since my lost faith in that will should entail that living and
thinking is pointless. But probably a tenured chair is stronger than any disillusion.
Or we can try to change the structure of significance, trying to manipulate the
architecture of language. How? Well first of all dissolving distinction of
structures: if society is a projection of language, then changing our metaphors
is a civic campaign.
