Abstract
While the humanities face various impasses and while any of us may sense that our “time is out of joint,” seldom does a book emerge that traces the path of the vanquished leading to our present. Fuoco B. Fann's This Self We Deserve: A Quest After Modernity offers an illuminating inquiry into modern knowledge, language, and the subject, drawing from French poststructuralism, continental and intercultural philosophies, and art theory. This review essay assesses the book's main claims: (1) that Euro-American (i.e., Western) knowledge has, over the past two centuries, lost its sustainability; and (2) that the present instability of knowledge has been bequeathed to us by a continuous modern tradition that we ought to “unlearn and relearn.” Drawing from Foucault, Derrida, Baudrillard, and others, Fann's Quest After Modernity weaves these thinkers’ ideas around a few central themes, including the modern speaking subject, modern phonetic language, ontology as white mythology, and various “post”-modern reversals.
Reviewed books
Fann Fuoco B. This Self We Deserve: A Quest After Modernity (Berkeley: Philosophy & Art Collaboratory, 2020)
Knowledge, language, being, and the subject: these themes have occupied philosophers since philosophy's beginnings. In This Self We Deserve: A Quest After Modernity, cultural theorist Fuoco B. Fann questions these perennial themes anew in a book whose ambitious scope is matched by the author's trenchancy. Fann joins Foucault's archaeology of the human sciences with Derrida's deconstruction of Western metaphysics; Lyotard's inquiry into postmodern knowledge with Baudrillard's contentious ideas about simulation; Bourdieu's habitus with Deleuze's Bergsonism; Barthes's mythical speech with Lévinas's assertion that Western philosophy has most often amounted to “ontological imperialism.” In the same text, Hamlet's monologue meets James Joyce's streams of consciousness; Van Gogh confronts Warhol; consumption reverses into “post-consumption” and aesthetics into banality and “post-aesthetics”; and First and Third World nations are shown to be in a relation, not of dialectical struggle-to-dominance, but of mutual interdependence and reversibility. Through its virtuosity, This Self We Deserve pushes the limits of what has been offered in continental philosophy since Kant and Heidegger, all to illuminate the confusions that haunt the modern subject—you, I, anyone.
In his opening note to the reader, Fann urges that it is imperative “not to innovate or deconstruct what we know, but to unlearn and relearn what we know” (p. vii). The process of unlearning and relearning brings two main contentions to light. Firstly, modern knowledge has lost its viability—that is, our knowledge, which informs academic inquiry as much as everyday life, is precarious. Secondly, this precariousness is the result of a continuous, coherent modern tradition of thought that has led to a present situation in which we, as privileged modern individuals, believe we are entitled to self-certainty via knowledge acquisition, yet are continually plagued by self-defacement. This modern tradition is dubbed “Western” on account of its historically European origins (although the modes of thought and socio-political problematics examined in the book are hardly unique to the geographic west today).
The book's five chapters are based on lectures that Fann delivered at the California-based Philosophy & Art Collaboratory, which “were intended as casual attempts to bring some heuristic understanding to the pressing question of what modern language, knowledge, philosophy, and art can do to the self” (p. vii). Lecture One (“Words are Cheap and Expensive”) is at first the most challenging: the author lays out the book's vast conceptual map in only 30 pages, which may be described thus.
Knowledge ruptured at the beginning of European modernity (Dreyfus and Rabinow, 1983; Foucault, 1966). Language formerly functioned as a transparent medium for knowledge because words, things, and human beings all belonged within a divinely woven tapestry. Around the turn of Kant's 19th century, however, modern man (l’homme) emerged at the center of a fragmented world, both as an object of knowledge and as a subject who knows; language would henceforth no longer function as a transparent medium for representation and became instead a discipline unto itself (i.e., philology, a 19th-century invention). In Foucault's view, modern language gained its own history, evolution, and labyrinthine complexity: “The modern phonetic language thus exists in its own name,” Fann writes, “and has its own life” (p. 4). As the epistemic foundations of premodern thought crumbled, basic concepts such as civilization, culture, history, and indeed knowledge itself became opaque.
Phonetic writing uses letters to represent the sounds of speech, and these speech sounds form words that, in turn, represent ideas; phonetic writing is therefore a written double of a spoken double. In Foucault's words (from a lesser known 1963 essay, “Le Langage à l’infini”), using a phonetic writing demands that “we place ourselves in the virtual space of self-representation and reduplication”; the presence of repeated speech grants phonetic-alphabetical writing a fictive yet incredible “ontological status” unknown in cultures (such as China) that use non-phonetic characters. Derrida (1967), meanwhile, observes that we believe in “pure speech” as the living expression of the mind, but nevertheless rely on writing as the material (dead) double of speech.
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This is quite the contradiction; in fact, using phonetic writing, the writing of speech, is what gave us the whole notion of “pure speech” in the first place. Fann's implication, tying Foucault with Derrida, is that modernity imposed an impassable abyss between language and the reality that language ought to represent: the “modern speaking subject” (which may be any of us) risks getting lost in this “virtual space” of the modern phonetic language. Just as reading God's words “Let there be light” emboldens our belief in the creative power of divine speech, so the modern speaking subject trusts the supreme power of their own voice: Speech—the sound, the voice, and the phonetic—is identified as creator, or spirit, which is supreme in the West. We believe in speech. The phonetic is contained within our breath—that is everything. (p. 8) In the Western view, breath represents God; breath also represents phonetics, and phonetics represent ideas. When phonetic sound is made, the breath, the phonetic, and God are forged as One. This is the power of God, or a power from God. (p. 10)
By contrast, the ancient origins of Chinese script (for Saussure [2009 (1916)] the “classic example” of ideographic writing) suggest a different understanding of breath as qi (氣), a pervasive energy of which humans are not in command. Chinese characters were first of all representations of the patterns of heaven-and-earth, “imbricated talismanic graphs” of a larger cosmic scheme (tian di 天地) in which humans, nature, and heavenly bodies affect each other through resonant response (ganying 感應) (p. 11). The example of (Classical) Chinese script invokes a worldview according to which the human act of speech is not the ontological model for the universe as it is in the west (Lagerwey, 1986). Viewed in light of Hegel and other historical European thinkers’ ethnocentric deprecations of non-phonetic language (Hegel said Chinese writing is deaf and mute, lifeless and without spirit; Vico called it “vulgar” hieroglyphs), the history of European-Chinese encounter exposes the West's anthropocentrism and the theological-ontological power we believe our speech carries (pp. 15–24).
Yet, our own onto-theological basis is unstable. Derrida carries forth Heidegger's distinction of Being from beings (Sein from seindes), suggesting that Western philosophy tries to define “being present” or “now” in absolute terms, giving temporal privilege to the present, but faulters because this “now” is always already “a trace of the erasure of the trace” (p. 13) (see Zhang, 2002). The privilege we moderns grant to the present, with our will to “heroize” the passing moment (Baudelaire, 1964 [1863]), “is inevitably a modern self-indulgence,” Fann avows, “since the passing moment is just a passing moment” (p. 25). “Modernity has provided us with a metaphysical map of mundane territory” (p. 27): we have walked out of the divinely given order of things and seek to overcome our own limitations in a Faustian quest for more and ever more knowledge (Foucault again; Habermas, 1987): Modernity—based on a paradoxical uncertainty (aporia) of the world but a logical certainty of modern knowledge—gives the modern speaking subject, the knowing subject—all of us—a power so that we can do the impossible. The impossible is that Man replaces God. This replacement, of course, uses not religion but the idea of modern knowledge. (p. 26)
The remaining lectures describe the consequences of this modern speaking subject's plight. Lecture Three (“I Think Therefore I Am Not”) confronts the instability of modern knowledge head on by suggesting that Max Weber's (1958 [1904]) encomiums to Occidental rationalism have misled us to believe that we can overcome the perennial uncertainty of life by exercising our individualistic power to choose. One of the most original contentions in This Self We Deserve is that Descartes’ “I think, therefore I am” has reversed today into we think, therefore we are (p. 86). We hold onto “I,” to individual thought, yet wind up thinking the same way everyone else does: we believe in privileged modern knowledge and our ability to choose from among an abundance of consumer objects and self-chosen values. “We are the man, … the privileged Modern Man, only because we would like to think we are privileged” (p. 29); in reality, “We are no longer destined to be a specific ‘individual’ but to be ‘individuals,’” hence individualism is subverted (p. 90).
Synthesizing Lyotard's (1984 [1979]) conviction that knowledge in the postmodern era “produces not the known, but the unknown,” creating “a duplication or paralogy of knowledge itself” with Foucault's (1966) contention that the human sciences are “pseudo-sciences,” “dangerous intermediaries in the space of knowledge,” Fann sums up, “the message here is clear: modern knowledge is buried and reduced to discourse” (p. 68). Fragmented into so many specialized fields and reduced to a commodity, knowledge loses its “use value,” which Lyotard suggested could be understood as “‘know-how,’ ‘knowing how to live,’ ‘how to listen’ [savoir-faire, savoir-vivre, savoir-écouter], etc.,” and is instead dominated by “exchange value.”
This Self We Deserve suggests that to recapture the “use value” of knowledge, one must see the consequences of the modern subject's egotism on both the world-historical and personal levels. Part of Lecture Two (“Knowledge is Bought and Sold”) is devoted to “unlearning and relearning” the concept of history, which Fann illuminates by joining the thought of the following:
− Roland Barthes (2013 [1957]), who stated that history is an “open appropriation”: “every object of the world can pass from a closed, silent existence to an oral state, open to appropriation by society”; − Baudrillard (2010 [1978]), who stated that “History is a product for Western export”; − Michel de Certeau (1988 [1975]), who warned that the “History of the World is a Western fabrication—it is the Western writing that conquers” (p. 48); − Lévinas (1979 [1961]), for whom “ontology is a philosophy of power,” a reduction of the Other to the Same; and − Derrida (1982 [1971]), who termed Western metaphysics a white mythology.
The book shines a cold, clear light on Hegel's linear-progressive view of world history as a dialectical progression through which, in his own words (1901 [1837]), “the superior principle [overcomes] the inferior.” Hegel called this an “a priori proof”; Fann rejoins: “It sounds like ‘gangster proof,’ but is indeed an ontological proof that has dominated the world since the nineteenth century” (p. 57).
Philosophy is not just an academic specialization, not just a collection of old books collecting dust. This Self We Deserve conveys a haunting vision of our contemporary. Our knowledge—in fact, our sense of self—is premised on something that does not exist: the fictive heroic “now,” the fictive “modern man,” whose mirage wanders in a virtual space, and the democratic ideals of freedom, equality, and personal power that bolster “ontological imperialism” and contribute to self-alienation.
This alienation takes various forms. Just as knowledge is robbed of its essential use for the self, in the contemporary art world (to quote Donald Kuspit [2004]), the “void left by the absence of faith in art is filled by the presence of money.” Whereas Munch's Scream or Van Gogh's Pair of Boots express genuine desperation, alienation, or a wish for something better—art as a “path to salvation”—in pop art à la Warhol or Koons, the individual heroic spirit of modernism is bleached by collective postmodern ennui: We are cool and no longer able to scream anymore. We are stuck in the current knowledge, and we are stuck with fetish objects and dead objects. We are affectless after all. Modernism is waning like a daydream. (p. 205) Are we too smart and critical to be guided by art to the hope for health, peace, and life? Are we seduced instead by art toward death (meaninglessness, neurotic impulse, or schizophrenia)? Today's art, then, is not only meaningless but also harmful. (p. 207)
As aesthetics reverses into “post-aesthetics,” so too does the traditionally established notion of consumption reverse into “post-consumption,” which Fann explains via Baudrillard's (1996 [1968]) elusive contention that consumption is no longer “defined by the nourishment we take in, nor by the clothes we clothe ourselves with, nor by the car we use.” Instead, post-consumption connotes participation in a sign system, a “virtual totality of all objects and messages ready-constituted as a more or less coherent discourse.”
Here is how I would sum up the modern problematic brought to light through the various movements of Fann's Quest After Modernity. As self-conscious individuals (Western or not), we believe in speech above all else yet our speech was long ago divorced from any larger order (whether cosmic, epistemic, historical, what have you). In the absence of the divine and under the spell of grand ideals, we live in an imagined kingdom of our own self-aggrandizing talk-tracks, an inner narrative that occurs through the avowedly secular-rational yet somehow still divinely ordained medium of phonetic language. (Lecture Four, “The Chattering Voice in Our Head,” listens for the “inner narrative of self” in Shakespeare, Flaubert, Joyce, and rock n’ roll lyrics—all expressions of the modern phonetic language.) We self-consume our own desires at the same time that we participate in a media whirl of objects-become-signs; this “triumphant democracy of artificial signs” (Baudrillard, 1993 [1976]) disenchants seemingly every aspect of perennial human life, leading to ever more uncertainty that we hope to compensate by following our ever-frustrated ever-renewed will to truth. In the process, we forget how to produce and can only ever reproduce; our present lacks original heroes like those we admire from the past. Race- and class-based prejudices, philosophically aided and abetted by the specter of Hegelianism, divide society while many individuals are faced with the unspeakable pain of broken delusion. This alienation is only intensified by the external appearance of sophisticated ennui in art and of artificial rationalization in network systems and the consumer's bodily hexis (Bourdieu, 1990 [1980]). In addition, our social “coolness” is only the obverse side of violent unreason (I think of addiction, suicide, mass shootings on the news…).
A reader who is initially frustrated with or depressed by the complex problematic addressed in This Self We Deserve (and in any of the “big theory” described therein) has not yet seen the point. This coherent modern tradition is, at the end, nothing but a dream—a harmful dream, but still just a dream. Our “time is out of joint” but our mind does not need to be (p. 176). Fann avows that books are like thick letters to friends, although today “these letters are ceasing to be messages for potential friends and instead are turning into archived things” (p. viii). This Self We Deserve could be a letter to any friend wishing, as I do, to awake from this modern dream and to recover something of the use value of knowledge.
I owe a great debt to This Self We Deserve and to Fann, who has mentored me for over a decade, transforming me from an alcoholic with neither hope nor the ability to read, write, and think into a UC Berkeley PhD (2021). This book has made my own study and work
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possible and has been an invaluable resource (perhaps surprisingly given its complexity) for teaching undergraduates, as it provides lucid snapshots into the history of philosophy and aesthetics. At the end of Fann's far-seeing—I insist: heroic—inquiry into modern thought, a patient reader willing to rise to the challenges of this text is left with an unexpected self-affirmation. This letter seems to say that you, friend, deserve to be a decent, content self, and most of all: to have the courage to be truthful: Can we take the world for the world, and not for its virtual doubles? Can we take man for man, and not for his virtual doubles? (p. 156) The little answer is simple: it is all about the awareness of the self—the modern or the postmodern, whichever suits your feeling at the moment—the same awareness of self that mankind has gazed upon from the beginning. (p. 211)
