Articulated Experiences: Toward a Radical Phenomenology of Contemporary Social Movements

6: An Epochal Theory of Action

141 C H A P T E R 6 An Epochal Theory of Action The task consists . . . in thinking being as presencing and as differing from its economic modalities. This task for thinking will be completed successfully only through a deconstruction of the principles that administer an age. That is where phenomenology, now radicalized, encounters the problem of acting. Schürmann, Heidegger on Being and Acting1 The radical phenomenological inquiry into the concept of identity brings us to the point where we need to view the epochal context in which identity-claims become possible. Now, it is time to link the question: “What is ‘new’ in new social movements?” to the question: “Are we postmodern yet?” Linking these two questions places new social movements in the context of time as the horizon of being and specifically in relation to a possible epochal shift. This task requires a specific attentiveness to the question of the post-modern which owes its epochal articulation to Heidegger’s “hypothesis of metaphysical closure” as explicated by Schürmann. 142 articulated experiences The Hypothesis of Closure: Are We Post-Modern Yet? According to the hypothesis of metaphysical closure, the principial economy expires in our age, and the nonprincipial becomes a concrete possibility. To realize that possibility, that potential contained in today’s order of things, it would be necessary to accept the absence of any meaning-bestowing center and to step from the age of Janus to that of Proteus. We may, in fact, have taken that step for quite some time already. Schürmann, “On Self-Regulation and Transgression”2 In spite of the heightened discussions about postmodernity’s presumed arrival and its seemingly increasing prevalence in arts, literature, music, body, mind, culture, city, society, and politics, today we are still left with the question , “Are we post-modern yet?” If, stricto senso, modernity refers to an era in which the principle of reason (in Leibniz’s dictum, “nihil est sine ratione ”)—a principle of which foundationalism, technological rationalization, teleology, or metanarrative are just various critical, theoretical expressions— comes to govern all aspects of life, then post-modernity should almost by definition signify a transmutation of that principle and the possible surpassing of the modern era that is so instituted and governed. Specifically, we need an epochal theory that would account for acting and thinking in the possible destitution of the principle of reason. Therefore, now it is time to present a synopsis of Schürmann’s epochal theory. In introduction to his Heidegger on Being and Action, Schürmann declares his project to engage “in raising the inherited question of the relationship between theory and practice, but considered under Heidegger’s hypothesis that metaphysical rationality produces its own closure. That inherited question is to be raised anew, then, from a perspective that forbids couching it in oppositions such as ‘theory and practice’.”3 Here, the term “metaphysics” is to be understood as the search for an ultimate foundation— that is, “a hupokeimenon, a ‘substrate’. Metaphysics is [therefore] a fundamentalist quest.”4 Metaphysical epochs emerge through founding Firsts, called arché, which provide “legitimacy to the principia, the propositions held to be self-evident in the order of intelligibility. They also provide legitimacy to the princeps, the ruler or the institution retaining ultimate power in the order of authority.”5 Together, arché, principium, and princeps establish a specific constellation of truth of an era that renders certain modes of action and thought intelligible, even required. That is to say, the configuration of life itself is organized around the governing principles of an era. That is why, even to the untrained eyes of layman, different eras can be distinguished from one another according to certain common practices and belief systems. We can all conveniently and understandably speak about the ancient times, an epochal theory of action 143 dark ages, or our own period, or the colonial era, the great depression, the sixties, and so on, and our designations will be widely comprehended. Strictly speaking, the history of the West has witnessed three succeeding metaphysical eras (or epochs), each governed by its own principium. The metaphysical principles and their founded epochs are: “the sensible substance for Aristotle [and the ancients], the Christian God for the medievals, [and] the cogito for the moderns.”6 From institution to its zenith, the reign of the principia over epochs goes unnoticed, as these principles make no pretence toward their principiality...