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Downloaded from Brill.Com10/02/2021 07:32:52AM Via Free Access Appendix 2 «The Phenomenology Lesson». A Commentary on the Illustrations Phenomenology has existed as a movement before becoming the matter of an entire philosophical consciousness.1 However, if this year 2012 of the Dragon had finally marked the consecration of Xi Jinping, that year also presaged all the uncertainties associated with it in the Chinese cosmology: above all, it was a year of danger …2 Introduction These illustrations represent a taste of what I wish to present in more elaborate de- tail and reasoned argumentation in a later work concerning the history of the phe- nomenological consciousness and philosophy long before the development and long-term context in which Kant and Hegel’s purely philosophical, « Self »-regarding phenomenological exercises came to be formulated. These historical contexts, often concerning a distant past, but that I choose to consider phenomenological «before the letter», as it were, were clearly contemporary with the events and structures con- cerning commodification explicated throughout City Intelligible, possessed in mind as a knowledge, whether believed in or not by those same actors at the roots of com- modification, … and, I wish to emphasise, structurally similar in general form. My chosen frontispiece for this volume represents such a conscious application of a phenomenology, and moreover possesses a structural character again similar to that uniting universal and particular with regard to the commodity, … at least as I have 1 Merleau-Ponty, Phénoménologie de la Perception, 8. 2 Brice Pedroletti, “La Route Sinueuse jusqu’au Sommet”, Le Monde (3 August 2019). Just like the sacrament the dragon represents a moment both of fundamental ontic and once-only onto- genetic transition, and an event constantly repeated in the banality of human existence, yet with the same values: that of a start and a new start. Thus the dragon not only forms an es- sential part of the Buddhist phenomenology of being (like Angel of Death in the Christian iconology) but also as symbol of the new year throughout South East and East Asia, opening before the individual the spectre of the new year as a new beginning, re-opening the present as if a field of re-opened possibility, positive or negative. Visual indiscernibility, notable of much representation of the very form of the dragon, signifies uncertainty of form, or an «all- ness» of possibility with respect of form. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���� | doi:10.1163/97890044149�1_011 Frank Perlin - 9789004414921 Downloaded from Brill.com10/02/2021 07:32:52AM via free access <UN> A COMMENTARY ON THE ILLUSTRATIONS 505 come to regard it. For the « evidence » I present is purely circumstantial. It is not an evidence of evident cause and effect, of evident credibility, but something that through argument and demonstration may or may not convince. But my purpose in this book is to do no more, above all, than lay bare certain presuppositions with which I have long worked in order to focus on, identify as such, and study intensively the phenomenological aspects of commoditisation itself. Argument must await a later work and be engaged in and for itself, exhaustively and at length. In the present case, I come to utilise materials that in some cases date from years of seemingly fruitless archival and library research carried out long ago, isolated instances inter- rupted by events, but that in sum mark out a long-term broadly comparative ap- proach to my central concern with a specific subject matter, societal development and its intimate connections with commoditisation and communication. I have es- pecially wished to bring to view the conscious dimensions of that history,—of what past populations must have known in order to lead their lives,—in order the better to illuminate and properly comprehend what I have called the evidence that con- fronts one in the archives: a global anthropology in which diverse populations once participated and communicated, dedicated to the tasks of communication, thus to what, broadly seen, may be termed the tasks of translation, a domain therefore that allowed such translational practice. It is for the reader to reflect upon this illustrative matter, to consider the circumstantial nature of the commentary below, regard criti- cally what I seek to show in considering, together with me, the connections I wish to draw, and either work them further or signal their doubts, even repugnance before them. But, yes, I also intend to illustrate this argument, in full, in the future work men- tioned above, utilising the image as the main medium of expression, even though drawn together by the threads of an explanatory text and commentary that enchains them into some continuity of general idea. Here, instead, they are intended merely as a documentary evidence for perhaps controversial claims made in various parts of this book or as visual support for various abstractions and thematic relationships marking contemporary expression of the metaphysical context of commoditisation, especially in Part 1, Chapter 3, § iii, and in Part 2. It is for these reasons that these claims, together with this visual support, remain largely impressionistic and, seemingly, without fur- ther ambition. For example, where I speak in the text of a «species garden» or « species- landscape », or, say, of a «knowledge-well» and « knowledge tower », the reader may be enabled by what I illustrate to see exactly to what I (or others, such as Kant himself) have been referring when inventing such arbitrary descriptive metaphor: their pur- poses is merely to possess some terms of reference to facilitate discussion, and I might have chosen other words. Thus, where I speak of wave theory in connection with contemporary art, I illustrate the case with certain works selected from the oeuvre of Edvard Munch. Yet, that same Frank Perlin - 9789004414921 Downloaded from Brill.com10/02/2021 07:32:52AM via free access <UN> 506 APPENDIX 2 reader will be at pains to discover any further argumentation, justifying or grounding the hypotheses set out in the text.3 No study of Munch’s writings lies behind such infer- ences, yet in order to be shown to be true that study is clearly required. Even then, one must also ask the unconscious effects of observed events in the context of one’s life and that secretly, as it were, become embodied unwittingly as concern and interest in one’s own actions and motivations, although without visible connexion. However, where this particular example is concerned, my claim extends to Munch’s conscious motiva- tion, and it is to the conscious domain of knowledge and intention that I have sought to focus much discussion above as being necessary for the existence of the commodity. Yet this historical past does not concern a philosophical phenomenology in the sense that Kant and Hegel made of it: it is phenomenological in what it pretends to explain, the ground of the kind of phenomenal world that we really experience, its meaning and its status, but not yet newly located as the gounds of our own possibility of thinking the world. Instead, it seems to me already remarkable as contemporary recognition of the need to describe the grounds of experience, the possibility of doing so, and, moreover, that behind some metaphysical or religious representation lies pre- cisely such a description. In its turn, the meeting of quantity with quality—that with makes possible the entire anthropology of the commodity—already seems, in, for ex- ample, the pages of Hegel, to have picked up and materialised this singular historical representation and concern. I shall return to this question further below. ... Where the different categories of illustrations are concerned, there is an essential connection … a sense of connectivity … that runs among all the different topics or 3 I have strictly avoided images of instruments and exhibits, or from books, held by the British Library and British Museum, especially from the rich collection held by the Department of Coins and Medals of the BM. For an independent researcher of scarce means, the costs of reproduction are prohibitive whilst independent photography by the researcher (under scru- tiny or not), even using a mobile telephone, is forbidden. This considerably increases not only costs but the amount of time required to take notes on each instrument considered significant, limiting very considerably one’s profitable use of the scarce time available for any visiting scholar to Britain. Yet, in the present case it is the need to compare as many material examples as can be assembled that counts for their careful analysis and differentiation, thus in order to comprehend the kinds of production and kinds of market for which such instru- mentation was destined, in particular where are concerned the portable boxes of coin weights and balances. Where the library has been concerned, a sixteenth-century work on medicinal practice had been subtracted from the public domain in order to charge such costs (personal conversation with staff). Fortunately I received generous help elsewhere, as ac- knowledged in this book. Frank Perlin - 9789004414921 Downloaded from Brill.com10/02/2021 07:32:52AM via free access <UN> A COMMENTARY ON THE ILLUSTRATIONS 507 aspects marked out by each example. This connectivity implies a true unity of the mat- ter of the real that comprehends all the differences that, empirically speaking, they serve to represent. Obviously, I equate an aspect of this unity with that Sacroboscan-kind of poesis of complete and absolute universal knowledge and connectivity much discussed above, and that forms one metaphysical aspect of the whole unifying framework that I per- ceive as being wholly at issue in this book: thus, that connectivity that serves to bind as one the universal and the particular, synthesis and analysis, and that gives, on the one hand, metaphysical meaning to that empirical reality lived by all persons whether rich or poor, and seen, for example, in Buddhist, Hindu, Safavid, Christian or North-West- Coast Amerindian figuration alike.
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