Repetition and Newness as Double Bind

The principle concept in Gayatri Spivak's new anthology, An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization, is that of the 'double bind'. The notion of a double bind encompasses dichotomies like such as man vs woman, planet vs globe, modern vs traditional. In other words, a double bind appears to be something like a Kantian antinomy: the point at which two perfectly logical but incompatible ideas cannot be synthesized any further. A double bind is thus a position between two concepts that cannot be further synthesized or made any more compatible with one another.

Spivak claims that the humanities are the disciplines that commonly seek to resolve double binds. This is evident in disciplines like the study of gender or post-colonial studies. In both instances the humanities seek to mitigate the divide between the concepts of man and woman, or the notion of Otherness. Spivak uses Schiller as a prime example of the way in which aesthetic or humane education usually attempts to synthesize or overcome a double bind. Spivak quotes Schiller's claim that aesthetic philosophy often fails because "either the investigation did not start with a sufficiently strict distinction, or it was not carried through to a pure and complete synthesis" (Quoted in Spivak, 2012, 19).

According to Spivak this attempt at synthesis is an inadequate way to deal with a double bind. Rather than pushing for ultimate synthesis, Spivak argues, one should seek to 'play' a double bind. One must try to navigate an antinomy not through synthesis, but through a sort of balancing act that arrives at something new. One must 'ab-use' the double bind that one is presented with.

Spivak chooses to use the term 'ab-use', which is entirely different from abuse. This notion of ab-use comes through most clearly as a way of using other people's ideas. To 'ab-use' an idea is to approach it knowing that you are going to distort it in the process of using it. You know that you will never completely or accurately engage with the idea as the author intended, so you approach it with the idea of making an intentional mistake. You use the idea, but you distort it in the process, bending it to your own purposes. In essence, you decide to live in a double bind by bending it to your own purposes.

For Spivak, the ultimate form of playing the double bind today comes from the ab-use of the European Enlightenment. She believes that post-colonial peoples need to find a way to reinvent the Enlightenment, to ab-use the Enlightenment "to expand the scope of this by an 'intended mistake': to bequeath a geography to it" (Ibid., 20). In other words, Spivak wants to "make the Enlightenment open to a(n) (ab)-use that makes room for justice, because it takes away the absoluteness of guarantees and secures it from the moderant satire of a Candide?" (Ibid., 21). Damn you and your damn parenthetical silliness, Spivak.

Moreover, Spivak claims that this double bind can also be rendered in terms of "the contradiction between planetary poiesis (imaginative making) and a named faith with an inherited record" (Ibid., 346). The problem is between making something new in the present out of the materials that we have inherited from the past.

This double bind of present and past is a huge one for me.

For Spivak too.

Unfortunately, I am out of time.

I have to go meet a friend.

But I intended to tell you how there is a way to collapse the double bind of past and present into another double bind: that of repetition and newness.

Because this is really the problem with the relationship between past and present. How is one to go on creating something new (the present-becoming-future) while still staying true to tradition (past-becoming-present)?

To me, this is a false problem.

Nothing will ever stay the same. We live in a Heraclitan world. Everything moves and nothing stays still.

Theory, too, must move with the world. As Spivak says, "All communicated action, including self-communicated action, is destined for errancy. This is so commonsensical a point that it is almost not worth making. Yet it is so hard to make this enter into theory. In order to conserve felicitous cases, we seem to be obliged to ignore destinerrancy" (Ibid., 28). I believe with Zizek and DeLanda's reading of Deleuze, combined with my reading of Collingwood and Clausewitz, I can create a theory that accommodates the movement of the world. A theory of practice that will train people's minds to operate with the mechanisms and technologies of the present, like Spivak wishes to do, but without a firm structure that could lead to a sort of doctrinaire self-deception. Instead, I propose Collingwoodian-Clausewitzian science of human affairs.

I believe this type of theory needs to hinge on the double bind of repetition and newness. That is, the paradoxical idea that newness can only emerge through repetition.

In order for this to be clear I will have to adequately explain historical thinking. I will have to explain simulation theory of mind and how historical thinking is about simulating past thoughts in the context of your present mind. I will have to explain how this simulation amounts to a repetition, and how that repetition can only lead to something new. I'll have to show that history is a branch of literature. I'll have to show that being a form of literature is partakes primarily of narrative. I'll have to demonstrate the capacity of narrative to not only generate understanding, but to generate our selves as well.

The double bind that an aesthetic education must deal with, I believe, is not the one of Enlightenment and the Other's ab-use of it. Nor is it the tension between tradition and modernity. Both of these are indispensable concepts, unavoidably real double binds.

But it seems to me that they both collapse into a larger double bind: That of Repetition and the New.

All of this will hopefully become much clearer in my essay on historical morality and the science of human affairs as anti-regularian morality.