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>> 53 2 Linguistic Impairment and the Default of Modernism Totality and Otherness: Dys-/Disarticulate Modernity I wander through each chartered street / Near where the chartered Thames does flow. William Blake, “London.” Blake’s famous poem lauds the triumphs of modern urban planning and natural science. Both city and nature have been placed under the charter of rational knowledge and guidance, and a just and fecund society prospers through this knowledge. Oh! Sorry! I was looking at the wrong note card! Of course, “London” is a bitter condemnation of modern forms of knowledge and their effects on nature and social life. But this mistaken conflation points toward the central epistemological and moral tensions of modernity, which can be summed up as the problem of knowledge as system or model. As Isaiah Berlin argued, the epistemological premise of the Enlightenment was that knowledge is potentially total, that “all genuine questions can be answered” by means of rational, empirical inquiry (21), that knowledge takes the form of propositions that are compatible with each other (64), and that the totality of the world would form a “closed, perfect pattern” (105). Michel Foucault described this approach to knowledge in more detail in The Order of Things. Enlightenment thinkers sought to achieve “an exhaustive ordering of the world” which could be “displayed in a system contemporary with itself” (74)—which is to say, that the means of representation would be entirely adequate to the objects represented, failing neither through lack nor excess. The ideal of knowledge entailed an ideal of language, of “signs, a syntax, and a grammar in which all conceivable order must find its place” (84). Such a language would “gather into itself . . . the totality of the world.”Crucially, though, for 54 > 55 operations” and assert that “there is a unity in the symbolic field, and culture, in all its aspects, is a language” (“To Write,” 13).1 This modern conflation of knowledge-representation-language-system -model-production-administration-culture-ideology seeks to portray a social-symbolic world without an exterior. It is all there; and what is there, is . . . what is. What is not known is simply not yet known—an empirical, not a systemic lack. Running parallel to, and within, these articulations of totalizing systems of knowledge, representation, and power have been the practices and discourses of dys-/disarticulation. As Michael Lemahieu wrote, “because the modern worldview acknowledges no limits to its discursive reach, there is no metalanguage that would escape its discourses and consequently no external perspective from which” to conduct a critique (74). If a system is presumed to be total and without exterior or remainder, opposition must take the form of a failure of articulation (the dysarticulate) or forcible exclusion—dismemberment—from the social-symbolic order (the disarticulate). In response to this dilemma, we see the creation of the modern radical other, conceived specifically as other to symbolization. And just as the development of modernity’s concept of system involves a conflation of linguistic, epistemological , economic, and political categories, so the development of modern alterity brings together a variety of incongruous entities “beyond representation .” The older theological-political functions of the prophet and sacred fool are often retained, but joined now with the workings of the sublime, the primitive, the unconscious, the body, the traumatic, the abject, the ethically infinite other (e.g., of Levinas), entities that have “neither word nor concept” (Derrida, “Difference,” 3; i.e., Heidegger’s Being and appropriation, Derrida’s differance, cendres, and shibboleth), Lacan’s “real,” as well as a variety of socio-political others: the woman, the racial other, the colonized, the proletarian, the Jew, the homosexual. Note that the exalted others are close kindred to the excluded, debased others, and that the socio-political “others” who have been disarticulated from the polity often partake of the dysarticulations of radical philosophical or theological alterity—e.g., Spivak’s subaltern who cannot speak or Coetzee’s Friday whose tongue has been cut off. “The relief of speech,” declared Kierkegaard’s Johannes de Silencio in Fear and Trembling, “is that it translates me into the universal.” Thus, 56 > 57 ideologies generates ever anew those paradoxes “that cannot be mediated ”—or, as Kierkegaard writes elsewhere, “keep[s] the wound of the negative open” (q. in Baker, 269). But what is it that for Derrida will move us out from the ideology of the center? For the problem always, in these kindred critiques of the totalizing system, is how to get out of it. It is not...

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