“This book is about those radical changes on the social side, as well as on the political, economic, and cultural sides. What concerns me is less the mechanics of the transition— the shift from brown to green energy, from sole-rider cars to mass transit, from sprawling exurbs to dense and walkable cities— than the power and ideological roadblocks that have so far prevented any of these long understood solutions from taking hold on anything close to the scale required.” -Klein, Naomi (2014-09-16). This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate (pp. 24-25). Simon & Schuster. Kindle Edition.
This addresses one of main points I failed to get to in yesterday’s post: that it’s not just a matter of changing our political or economic system, it’s a matter of changing sensibility, of addressing issues that simply cannot be legislated except through Orwellian methods that have been shown time and time again to fail. And this is what philosophy (as well as art (is best equipped to do.
But I’m not just talking about philosophy here. I’m mainly thinking of philosophy of the continental kind, that which leans towards a more poetic approach such as that of Rorty’s, or of Deleuze’s or Derrida. Certainly, the more analytic/scientific approaches of such thinkers as Dennett, Searle, Pinker, or Dawkin’s have a role to play. But their primary focus is on changes in the body of knowledge the reader gets from them. The literary/continental approach, on the other hands, drives mainly towards changing the sensibility of the reader: of offering a different perspective from which the reader can derive their own way of engaging the world (their reality (that is influenced by the writer.
For instance, if we read a continental writer like Baudrillard too literally, we might recognize that, at some point or other, the entity he describes, the Simulacrum, does not exist in any tangible sense. Still, if we engage in the suspension of disbelief required for the enjoyment of literature, we change in terms of sensibility which leads to a change in understanding. We begin to recognize the way corporate owned media makes this all seem like something it is not. We begin to see how the world we see in TV ads (or even movies and TV series (the shadows on the cave wall in which everyone lives in this age of joy based on consumer/producer Capitalism (that is despite their resonance and seduction (is not our world. In other words: our sensibility is changed and we begin to feel the very alienation that Marx described in a very postmodern way.
And I would note here, Deleuze and Guattarri’s dismay in What is Philosophy about how marketers are out to steal the role of creating concepts. But for the marketers, it is more about controlling sensibility as compared to influencing it.
To give you a more concrete example of what I am on about, consider the American mythology concerning home ownership. It is this very mythology that has led to urban and suburban sprawl that has led to the mythology of car ownership (as compared to public transport (that, in turn, has contributed greatly to manmade climate change; that is when what we should be doing is concentrating our space of habitation and employment (thereby leaving more room for trees which convert CO² into oxygen. We have to ask ourselves if owning a home or a car is really that important when (given the maintenance they require (we could be focusing our energy on finding our higher selves: something we could as easily do in an apartment within walking distance of our place of employ? We have to ask ourselves if it is really worth it.
And given that what we are mainly up against here is a mythology, wouldn’t the best route for us be fighting fire with fire: of pitting our mythologies (our resonance and seduction (against the mythologies of producer/consumer Capitalism: their (the marketers (resonance and seduction?