Swirling beyond our time

along minoan and nazcan lines

pp. 133-155

in: Samuel B. Mallin, Art line thought, Berlin, Springer, 1996

Abstract

We are coming to better understand that philosophy is indeed as much tied into the technologistics of our age as are other academic and scientific disciplines. Heidegger's critique of technologistics ("Gestell") suggests, nonetheless, that we should search continually for ways of turning out of it, and that our philosophy has to keep trying to bend away from being fully caught up in the technical and formal lines endemic to our traditional philosophical practices. I have tried to resist this tendency to float away into our contemporary "heaven of ideas" by localizing and concretizing my writing, not only in artworks, but in the contingencies of the situations wherein they are communicated. However, it is extremely hard to treat a book or journal as a locale, as both so greatly ensconce the lines of our academic age and its professionalism. For example, I try to break and disrupt these contemporary flows and tonalities that rule a book (but with difficulty as we must all find them to be almost irresistible) by locating initially some of its chapters in non-technical and non-specialist contexts and situations. In that spirit, this chapter was initially written for a lecture series in a graduate school of art rather than for a philosophical forum (1988), and subsequently condensed for the Merleau-Ponty Circle.