Modern consciousness widely accepts logic as the most reliable road to truth. Most of us see the “logical” mind as one focused on fact and objectivity. This sturdy belief in logic is not unfounded, and in most cases it is intellectually preferable to prejudiced convictions that require no proof at all.

Yet logic, as a way of knowing, has defects that must be recognized. Can we fully trust the truth value of an exercise that leads to contradiction? What’s more, any logical syllogism must begin with hypothetical premises, or premises that have not been proven in themselves. The starting point for a syllogism, thus, is not the truth, so can its conclusion be? Too many logical thinkers assume that a proof’s validity is equivalent to real truth, even though tautologous logic is (by definition) a valid kind of thinking otherwise unrelated to reality. The problem with all logic, then, is that it too easily conflates validity in “pure thought” with truth in the external world. Rationality requires internal consistency, not truth; it is principally analytic, a way of knowing that makes no real comparison to experience.

The imagination, however, is synthetic, and can connect the mind to the facts of reality. When we use numbers and mathematics, for example, we need imagination to apply what logic tells us in theory alone. A geometrical proof can be coherent and sound, sure, but it is essentially meaningless without a human imagination to suggest that a proof is analogous to this or that surface, structure, or object. The insistence on tautologous logic in itself neglects the pivotal role that imagination plays in making logic meaningful. We need to replace this consensus, with one that better understands imagination and appreciates its application as a way of knowing.

Modern science is a second possible way of knowing, and one with many more facets to consider: from hypothesis and sense perception to conclusion. An empiricist asserts that science is successfully synthetic, that its entire function is to connect the mind more fully and rigorously with nature. In the same way that logic is confined to the mind, empiricism is lost in the world. Sir Francis Bacon, to this end, suggested induction by way of “fact-gathering” through the senses. Yet there are an infinite number of facts in the world—where to begin? What is important? Only the human imagination can answer these questions, and give some direction to science’s open-ended project. It is never empiricism alone but its interaction with imagination that leads to scientific discovery. When Isaac Newton saw an apple falling from a tree, he did not perform an experiment. Rather, he imagined a hypothesis that the apple was falling due to the phenomenon of gravity, and then he did the testing, the fact-gathering and the proof. Modern positivist science, thus, fails to discern between contexts of discovery—in which imagination locates something new in the world—and contexts of justification (in which empirical research gathers the evidence). Bare scientific data has never supplied a hypothesis.

Our brand of science can only conclusively falsify, after the fact, whereas imagination can come up with new ways of understanding the world. Hume points out that positivism pretends to rely only on experience, but makes claims of causality and connection, which are not experienced but conceived. All scientific knowledge, basically, is an imagined theory afforded to us by an inventive, inspired human mind. Much like logic, empiricism itself can go only as far as imagination takes it.

In effect, imagination surpasses “science” at both ends of the process. In the first place, it produces an insight that is new, instructive, and worth the effort of scientific corroboration; and, in the second place, it generalizes the facts into a workable whole. Empiricism, left alone, would have no place to start and no end in sight.

So what then is this imagination we have been discussing, and what should it be? The imagination is the human intellectual faculty by which a mind creates. When a writer concocts a narrative in his mind, or a composer hears a sonata before it is ever played, the imagination is the creative faculty doing the basic work. When a sleeping child dreams, the imagination interprets random neural firings and molds them into a meaningful narrative. When a speaker invents a new word, it is his imagination that is making the metaphor, linking the meaning he hopes to convey with a sound that might convey it. And, finally, when any of us look out at reality, our sense organs take in an enormous body of simple data. We take in information about which atoms of what material are where, how many waves are bouncing into our ears, etc.—but only our imagination can shape all of it into a conceptual world. Only our imagination can see color, motion, and form; only our imagination can conceive of isolated data as something larger and something whole. So, the essence of the imagination—and the reason why imagination should factor more prominently among our modern ways of knowing—is that only its creative capability can make a whole out of parts. Logic is a step-by-step process, but only imagination can give us a conclusion. Science has a mass of individual data, but only imagination can combine it into theory. The world consists of a disorder of atoms; only the imagination can order it.

The most basic manifestation of these imaginative processes is the human capacity for metaphor. We commonly know metaphor as a literary device, but it is equally accessible to us as a way of knowing—as when we know something more about time by saying “time is money.” A metaphor is valuable because it makes a sort of leap thereby creating an idea that goes beyond pre-existing knowledge.

To the modern, empirical mode of analysis, only literal copula is meaningful language. So, for instance, the rigorous logician can rightly and meaningfully say “flesh is tissue” or “flesh is pink.” But statements like “flesh is tissue” are certain and therefore never new, and statements like “this flesh is pink” are observational and never universal. Only a statement like “flesh is but grass” (this comes from the Bible) is both new and universal—figuratively true even though it has never been thought before. But metaphorical thinking does not just open up new ways of thinking about the world, it could also radically change the way we treat each other. With a stronger focus on imagination, we might be able to more often see a metaphor for ourselves in others, to see parts of ourselves in others, and to see human beings as a combined whole. Moral motivation, at its most basic, is a form of metaphor-creation: of standing up for a community because that community “is” you.

The imagination is a way of knowing that is necessary for logic and science. Logic cannot conclude, cannot make the absolutely imperative connection between thinking and truth; science in itself, meanwhile, would have nothing at all to prove. Our modern consensus needs to take the importance of imagination more into account. We must recognize imagination as well as use it, because a consciously rigorous reinterpretation of imagination would endow us with better minds. Poetic thinking used to be experiential and unconscious, rather than being the conscious realm of artists only.

A reevaluation of imagination might allow us to resist the unimaginative violence of literalism and fundamentalism. The writers of the Bible, for example, saw figurative meaning as the most instructional; their stories are centrally metaphorical. Literalism, at its core, is an empiricist’s derivative way of clinging to such mythology. Fundamentalism itself is a stubborn insistence that mythology’s concepts—which were always, first and foremost, figurative—should now be understood empirically. Remaking the imagination, thus, would restrain the excesses of literal and logical thought, creating for ourselves a world of new insight and of mutually reinforcing creation. The imagination is how we participate, with each other and with our shared ideas. With it, we can look at, live in, and build the universe at every daily moment of our lives—we can be poets (from poetica: “to make”). We can understand subjectively and yet still understand the truth. We can construct and combine, synthesize and unite, know a thing by knowing what it’s like. And, if we allow ourselves, we can create the world—just like the gods we’ve made in our image.

So if Truth is Working, perhaps it’s best to know what it is that truth is working towards. What, then, is truth, according to the artist? For Kippenberger, truth is shit. Truth-shit (Wahrheitsscheiße), Kippenberger complains, is all one sees in the artworld, and it dirties everything. The Truth-Shit stinks and it overwhelms one’s senses. Out in the open, this truth contaminates one’s perception—it’s better flushed down the appropriate network of ducts into a closed, unseen container. In “Against Interpretation,” Susan Sontag writes: “Like the fumes of the automobile and of heavy industry which befoul the urban atmosphere, the effusion of interpretations of art today poisons our sensibilities.” She is referring to the production of Truth-Shit: the practice of trying to find the “true meaning” that underlies the visible content of an artwork. For it seems as though one cannot look at an artwork without “translating” it, or, in other words, assuming that the features of an artwork constitute a code that is symbolically linked to some sort of unseen truth. Interpretation therefore hinders one’s ability to look at an artwork, since the interpretive viewer sees only Truth-Shit, and is blinded by the compulsion to construct meaning.

One can only thwart this interpretive regime by disrupting the process of truth-fabrication and learning how the ducts carrying the Truth-Shit actually function. Artists must know how meaning in artworks is created: through interpretation, the setting in which art is displayed, and the values of the social institution of the artworld at large. They must also know what prevents this meaning from being created and familiarize themselves with the situations in which interpretation fails.

It is here that the archetypal figure of “the dilettante”—one who lacks the academic discipline of the professional artist—becomes particularly relevant. The dilettante creates works of pure visible form that lack truth content; works that, lacking this content, resist interpretation.

Kippenberger found great potential in the posture of the artistic dilettante and produced works that strove to evade and manipulate the production of Truth-shit. He did so by creating works that skirted the formulation of truth content and symbolic meaning. Without these two things, the interpretive production of Truth-shit is rendered impossible. But executing such a feat requires a grasp of the constellations that are formed by artworks, how frame and context come together to supply an artwork with a meaning. An artist does not simply endow a work with a meaning which a viewer later unearths. Instead, the context of an artwork generates meaning in conjunction with its content. It is the task of the dilettante to put this process on display.

Nonetheless, the term “dilettante” has historically been used to disparage an artist’s lack of discipline or technical comprehension. Fields of study defend themselves institutionally by constructing a set of rules that takes years to master. Dilettantes ignore these rules, and because they cannot commit to one field of study, they frustrate their more regimented colleagues with a lazy contentment to know only a little about everything. The dilettante wants results.

Friedrich Schiller, German aesthetician of the nineteenth century, argued that the dilettante’s inability to tolerate the boredom of discipline barred his work from the sense of unity found in the work of the artist-genius. For Schiller, such a complete work conveys truth content through visual form. The dilettante, by contrast, approaches art as a pleasure-seeking activity, capable only of appreciating form and blind to the truth content that pours out of the work of the artist-genius. Dilettantes, Schiller contends, operate entirely on the surface and render the shadow of a complete artwork; an artwork, moreover, that is bereft of truth.

Contrary to this widespread disdain, the twentieth-century development of modern culture demanded the versatility of the dilettante. In a complex world of galleries, museums, and vast collections, an artist is required to perform many roles simultaneously. Suddenly, the qualities that once branded the dilettante as a pariah in the artworld became, in some respects, necessary for professional success.

Under these changed conditions, the dilettante has now been transformed into a strategic figure skilled at negotiating the elaborate social institutions surrounding aesthetic production. The new, strategic dilettante choreographs the disruption of programmatic art interpretation by tampering with the frames of its institutional context. This figure intends no oppositional subversion, but instead comically plays with the frames of the artworld, breaking them open and revealing their failures. Unlike Schiller’s artist-genius who creates truth, the strategic dilettante identifies the institutions that make the construction of truth possible.

Kippenberger is an exemplar of the strategic dilettante, producing works that strive to evade and manipulate the interpretative production of Truth-shit. Kippenberger places a work with a crude, literal meaning into an exhibition situation in which a deeper, symbolic meaning is expected. He thus asks the viewer and critic not “What does this painting mean?” but instead, “Can you interpret this?” The answer is “No,” or, “You could, but you’d fall for the trick.” Still, one cannot take these works for a cheap prank, either. Instead, they pose a difficult challenge, in which another mode of reception is necessary.

Kippenberger’s manipulation of the frame generates meaning dependent on the circumstances of its exhibition. In order to point to the frame’s role in the production of meaning, Kippenberger utilizes objects and images to frame that represent a semantic degree-zero, or, using Schiller’s vocabulary, pure form bereft of truth content. With the right frame, anything can become significant. Conversely, an object without a frame remains insignificant.

Kippenberger often encloses an otherwise amateurish or unfinished abstraction within text. In his painting We Don’t Have Problems with the Rolling Stones because We Buy their Guitars (1986), the long title frames an egg shape bearing the outline of a pair of hands pulling on an unrecognizable object. Given the rather atrocious quality of this image, it seems that Kippenberger spent more energy devising the title than actually painting the work. The central importance of the title in Kippenberger’s work demonstrates the process by which an external frame can create meaning.

Traditionally, a frame’s edges guide the viewer’s gaze to the work’s content, while its body remains invisible. In this mode, the frame cannot possess value separate from the work. It structurally supports the work’s meaning, an interpretative aid rather than an object that calls for scrutiny.

In Kippenberger’s work, however, a frame, or title, does possess distinct aesthetic value, distracting the viewer’s gaze from the work itself. The act of interpretation is disrupted, since the viewer cannot decide whether to scrutinize the work or the frame. The frame’s traditional function as a regulatory border that isolates the artistic object therefore collapses.

Through this organized failure, Kippenberger proves that meaning is not contained within an artwork, hermetically sealed by a frame. Rather, meaning travels through the work like the viewer’s gaze. The frame is perpetually transgressed and this variable system constantly re-forms the previously-considered “autonomous” artwork. The violation of this autonomy eliminates the possibility of a Schiller-esque “complete work.” Lacking the clear demarcation that a traditional frame provides, Kippenberger’s work presents itself as unfinished, thus drawing attention to the conditions that make the work’s meaning possible.

For the strategic dilettante, the construction of meaning depends on the multiplicity of forces that create the conditions for exhibition: the social space of presentation, the regime of criticism that dominates reception, and the business transactions that make presentation possible. These elements constitute a system of frames that engulfs itself, over and over again. In this environment, it would be erroneous to consider an artwork complete and autonomous. Instead, the notion of intrinsic meaning is invalidated by a system of frames that engulfs itself, over and over again.

In his painting The Problem Perspective, Kippenberger’s layered abstraction is framed by a text that forcefully addresses the traditional critic: “You are not the problem. It is the problem maker in your head.” Although viewers who claim to interpret art believe that they are sincerely excavating the truth hidden in a work, no interpretive problem or symbolic code lies within the art object itself. It lies only in the heads of those who are overwhelmed by Truth-shit.

Jerome: Yo dude, you aight? Locke looks confused. Uh…look sounds like you’ve had a rough night. I’m about to go get a buffalo chicken sandwich at that corner store, you wanna join?

Locke: What’s this buffalo chicken? Some kind of hybrid hell-creature? All I want is to get back to my study…

Jerome: Chill, it’s just a sandwich. Come on, it’s Saturday night you can’t study all the time. My name’s Jerome…Who are you?

Locke: I am John Locke!

Jerome: Like…from Lost?

Locke: Yes, I’m lost…

Jerome: No, no, the television show, Lost.

Locke: Television?

Jerome: You aren’t the actor from the TV show?

Locke: I told you, I’m John Locke! I am a philosopher.

Jerome: Whoa, man, are you telling me you think you’re…the John Locke? Like from the old days?

Locke: The old days? What year is it?

Jerome: It’s 2011.

Locke: 2011!? How can this be?? I was just in my study naught but several moments ago, and I am quite sure the year was 1689…

Jerome: Are you telling me you time traveled? Plus, I’ve seen pictures of John Locke…you, my friend, are not John Locke.

Locke: How dare you?! Of course I’m John Locke…

Jerome: Look…no offense but I’m pretty sure John Locke was a white dude.

Locke: What?

Locke catches a glimpse of himself in a reflective window and realizes that he inhabits the body of The Artist Formerly Known as Prince.

Locke: How can this be? This is not my body…and yet I certainly feel myself to be myself…I certainly remember being myself in my study in Oxford in 1689 just a few moments ago…

Jerome: I dunno man, it’s like your soul just up and jumped into another body…

Locke: I suppose that could be the case…for if the Identity of Soul alone makes the same Man, and there be nothing in the Nature of Matter, why the same individual Spirit may not be united to different Bodies?

Jerome: But if it’s just the soul that makes up the man, then it’s possible that the same person can appear to be all different men living in different places…right?

Locke: Nay, for a person must have a consciousness, a memory of past experiences of self to stretch through time.

Jerome: Right…but even if we accept that, then it seems like we have a really strange use of the word “Man” if it refers to an idea where Body and Shape are excluded…

Locke: Hmm…yes, that is an apt comment. This reminds me of a puzzle I was thinking of not so long ago. Suppose that the Soul of the Prince, carrying with it the consciousness of the Princes past Life, enter and inform the Body of a cobbler as soon as deserted by his own Soul, everyone sees, he would be the same Person with the Prince, accountable only for the Prince’s actions: But who would say it was the same Man?

Jerome: I mean…he would probably say he’s the same man, right?

Locke: Yes, I suppose he would say he’s the same man. Yet the body too makes the man, and would, I guess, to every Body determine the Man in this case, wherein the Soul, with all its Princely Thoughts about it, would not make another Man: but he would be the same Cobbler to everyone besides himself.

Jerome: So…what, you’re Locke to you, but to me, you’re someone else?

Locke: Yes I suppose that’s how it works. My personal identity consists in my consciousness. For since consciousness always accompanies thinking, and ‘tis that, that makes every one to be, what he calls self, and thereby distinguishes himself from all other thinking things, in this alone consists personal Identity, i.e. the sameness of a rational being. But to others, I am just like any other external object, a mere collection of ideas, and thus they can see me as this other fellow.

Jerome: Man, that’s some crazy shit! All this is too much for me…Let’s get us some buffalo chicken.
The two men enter the deli and walk up to the counter.

Cashier: What do you want tonight?

Jerome: Two buffalo chickens, please.

Cashier: That’ll be nine dollars.

The man hands the cashier nine dollars and the cashier hands the sandwich to Locke and motions to a small, dimly-lit dining area. “I see your true colors” by Cyndi Lauper is playing in the background.

Jerome: Yo dude, cool talking to you, but I’m gonna bounce. Good luck with everything and enjoy that sandwich.

Locke sits down apprehensively at a small table in the corner. He begins to unwrap his food when suddenly…

Sandwich: Whadup, brotha!

Locke jumps back, aghast.

Sandwich: I said, whadup? What, you never talked to a sandwich before?

Locke: This…this sandwich is talking to me…

Sandwich: Yeah man, you talkin’ to a sandwich. It happens. How you doin?

Locke: Well, I…I’m a bit distressed, to be honest. This has been quite a night…

Sandwich: Distressed? Man, what’s eating you? The Sandwich starts laughing hysterically. Get it man? What’s eating you? Cuz, you know, you’re about to eat me. Sandwich laughs again. Locke looks blank. Sandwich coughs, regains composure. Naw man, seriously, what’s getting you down?

Locke: Well, I was in my study reading about Boyle’s Corpuscular Hypothesis…

Sandwich: Cracka, what?! Who’s boilin’ corpses?

Locke: No, no Boyle’s corpuscular hypothesis. It’s the greatest science of our day. Boyle theorizes that all the matter in the world is made up of nothing but tiny colorless, tasteless, soundless, odorless, corpuscules of matter.

Sandwich: Even me? Am I a corpuscule?

Locke: You aren’t just a corpuscule; you are made up of many corpuscules. Just as this table and these chairs are made up of all the same basic elements of matter.

Sandwich: But if I’m a delicious, savory-smelling Sandwich with red tomatoes, white ranch dressing, green lettuce and orange hot sauce, how can I be made up of things that are colorless, tasteless, and odorless?

Locke: Well, I’ve been puzzling that lately myself. I believe that it lies in the distinction between your primary and secondary qualities. You see there are things that actually exist in the world, and those are simple, indivisible pieces of matter. Those pieces of matter give objects like you primary qualities—like bulk, figure, number, and motion—and that’s what really exists out there in the world.

Sandwich: …what?

Locke: Think of the color black. It is one thing to perceive and know the idea of black, and quite another to examine what kind of particles they must be and how ranged in the Superfices to make any object appear black.

Sandwich: So, you’re saying I have the idea of black in my mind, but that idea is caused by particles of matter that aren’t necessarily black?

Locke. Quite true. In fact, they are not black at all. To clarify my terms, whatsoever the Mind perceives in itself or in the immediate object of Perception, Thought, or Understanding, that I call idea; and the power to produce an Idea in our mind, I call Quality of the Subject.

Sandwich: So my idea of black is just the result of some hocus pocus that happens with these colorless corpuscules that makes me think what I’m seeing is black, when in reality, it’s just a bunch of teeny colorless blobs doing some voodoo?

Locke: In a way, yes. But it doesn’t mean that black doesn’t exist, it certainly does exist as an idea in your mind, but it doesn’t exist out there in the world the way we may at a cursory glance think it does. Thus, the primary qualities are the ones that are really out there in the world, and the secondary qualities are those things that exist in our minds as a result of those primary qualities that are really out there in the world.

Sandwich: Man, this is really confusing. Why can’t there be colors and smells and tastes really in things? I mean, don’t want to toot my own horn or anything, but I think I’m pretty tasty…are you tellin’ me I’m not tasty?

Locke: That’s just the thing, your taste is a secondary quality dependent on the mind of a thinking being to have that idea of taste.

Sandwich: So…I’m not tasty unless you’re there to taste me and have ideas of tastiness in your mind?
Locke: Precisely. Light, Heat, Orangeness or spiciness, are not really in you. Take away the Sensation of them; let not the Eyes see rivers of Ranch dressing flowing over your bountiful barbeque chicken strips, or the red of your tomatoes, nor the Ears hear Sounds of me munching away at you; let the Palate not Taste your crisp lettuce nor the Nose smell your lightly toasted bread buns, and all Colours, Tastes, Odors, and Sounds, as they are such particular Ideas, vanish and cease, and are reduced to their Causes, i.e. Bulk, Figure, and Motion of parts.

Sandwich: Wait a minute, wait a minute …how can you get colors, and smells, and sounds from colorless, soundless, odorless fluff?

Locke: That’s a good question. Look at this knife that I’m going to use to cut you up with momentarily. Sandwich looks, wide eyed for a moment with fear, accepts his fate, reclaims composure. When a knife cuts our flesh, it causes pain. Now, I cannot imagine what it is about steel that leads to the sensation of pain…yet would you doubt that the steel cutting against my flesh caused the pain?

Sandwich: No, I wouldn’t doubt that.

Locke: But you wouldn’t say that there’s any pain inside the knife, would you?

Sandwich: No, I wouldn’t say so.

Locke: So, the knife merely has the power to inflict pain on me if it goes into my flesh, but the pain is in my own body and mind. Thus, you’ve got some kind of complex interaction between the powers of the knife and my animal spirits that leads to the idea of pain. That idea need no more cause than the interaction that causes it.

Sandwich: But the interaction itself is only an interaction of primary qualities? That’s not a problem for you?

Locke: It is indeed puzzling, but no, not really. That is why I posit two different kinds of substances with two different causal mechanisms. The one, primary qualities, have causes in the real world. The other, secondary qualities, have causes in the nominal world, that is, the world of my mind.

Sandwich: So…I really am just a bundle of corpuscules?

Locke: Essentially, yes.

Sandwich: This is all so confusing…I feel like I don’t even know who or what I am anymore…

Locke: You? Why you are a very powerful Sandwich!

Sandwich: Powerful?

Locke: Yes, you have great powers, like the knife. Your secondary qualities are not just ideas in my mind, they are Powers to produce those wonderful sensations in me by the very nature of your Primary qualities, i.e. by the Bulk, Figure, Texture and Motion of your insensible parts as Colours, Sounds, Tastes, etc.

Sandwich: But you just said that my secondary qualities weren’t really out there, they weren’t real Qualities.

Locke: Well, such Qualities, which yes, in truth, are nothing in Objects themselves…but they are Powers! Powers to produce various Sensations in people like me…we can’t even resist that power, it’s automatic. You have the power to produce all kinds of sensations in me…it’s just that the power you have to do that depends on the primary qualities of your parts, as I have said.

Sandwich: Look, what you’re saying doesn’t really make sense to me. I mean, think about it. You say I have these powers right?

Locke: Right.

Sandwich: But by “have” you don’t really mean that I have these powers, you just mean these powers exist somewhere in this world and when my primary qualities interact with your primary qualities…what are these “powers?” What’s their status, yo?

Locke: Like I said, they’re ideas. They exist in the nominal realm just like souls.

Sandwich: I just don’t get it. How do we get secondary qualities from primary qualities? I mean, really, where do they come from? They exist in totally different realms…so how can one create the other? Why can’t secondary qualities have effects on primary qualities? Why does the causal chain go in only one direction?

Locke: To have relational properties of objects, you need to have objects! And those objects have to be grounded in some sort of real world. So, primary qualities necessarily have to preclude secondary qualities because secondary qualities—which are just powers—need something to operate on! So in ways…perhaps the causal chain can go in two directions, but not in the way you’re conceiving…secondary qualities do act on objects, just not the objects that they stem from, but rather other objects with sense-receptors. That’s the only way this whole thing works.

Enter another distressed looking man in strange clothes and a large wig. He looks around the restaurant and notices Locke. He is Bishop George Berkeley.

Berkeley: Locke? Is that you?

Locke: Yes, who are you?

Berkeley: I’m Bishop Berkeley, I tore your work to shreds after you died…

Locke: Oh. Hello.

Berkeley: What’s going on here? I just had the strangest experience…I was studying and…

Locke: Yeah, same thing happened to me. Have a seat, me and this sandwich are discussing metaphysics.

Berkeley: The sandwich? Locke, you’re crazier than I thought you were, sandwiches can’t talk…

Sandwich: Cracka, please!

Berkeley: Well, I’ll be…

Locke: I was just assuring this here Sandwich that even though he is really only made up of primary qualities like bulk, texture, figure, motion, etc. he still has the power to produce many wonderful sensations in men, and so he should not feel degraded by my philosophy…

Berkeley: Primary qualities? Secondary qualities? No, no that’s silly. This Sandwich doesn’t really exist at all!

Sandwich: Man, y’all are some crackheads.

Lights dim.

And such bankruptcy is not surprising considering the fact that Drive Angry 3D fails on an astonishing number of levels: from the monotony of even its gun-fighting to the feeble allusions to Paradise Lost that it attempts to make (for example, Cage’s character is named Milton). However, taken together, these failures somehow amount to more than the sum total of their parts. They become something else and turn the film into something fascinating: a juggernaut of failure that plunges the viewer into alarmingly critical depths.

Essential to what I would like to call the “critical absurdity” of Drive Angry 3D is the medium of 3D itself. When 3D cinema made its first enormous dent in popular culture with James Cameron’s Avatar, my Marxist super-ego was sent into overdrive. I panicked over the intellectual depravity of the modern American cinema-goer and was reminded of the cover Guy Debord’s landmark book The Society of the Spectatle, which pictures a crowd of 3D-glasses-clad viewers staring blankly at screen that is out of frame.

The Society of the Spectacle’s cover is apt for Debord’s book in so many ways. It depicts how popular culture creates images that wash over its viewers, rendering them critically paralyzed and content with a life of illusion. And the medium of 3D film illustrates this practice of visual domination perfectly. The 3D image extends out of the flatness of the cinema screen and into the dimension of real life while simultaneously existing as an illusory farce of real life. The 3D image envelopes the viewer in its cinematic apparatus, using its anesthetizing effect to alienate the viewer from reality.

However, through the absurdity of its failures, Drive Angry 3D disrupts the Debordian hegemony of 3D film. For unlike Avatar, which was heralded for its visual mastery and commentary on globalization, allowing Cameron’s film to successfully seize reality within mass consciousness, Drive Angry 3D’s poor execution draws attention to its own blaring falsity.

From its dreadfully humorless screenwriting to its elaborate pastiche of a plotline, Drive Angry 3D is rife with moments that prevent the viewer from getting into the world of the film. Even the bullets and shrapnel that protrude outward toward the audience—the hallmark of the 3D experience—appear geometrically abstract in Drive Angry 3D’s poorly-rendered CGI.

The resulting experience is one in which the apparatus of 3D cinema unravels before the eyes of the viewer. Drive Angry 3D’s arresting absurdity breaks the film open, allowing the viewer to be constantly aware of the mechanisms behind its failed spectacle. And thus, Drive Angry 3D reveals to its audience everything that it sought to conceal: a film that released during a season normally reserved for the dregs of Hollywood, an actor (Nicholas Cage) who will act in any film in order to maintain his lifestyle, and a cinematic concept that unsuccessfully strove to give America everything it wanted—cars, guns, and fire. And it is within these failures that the power of critical absurdity lies.

An especially powerful example of this appears in a scene—that was actually stolen from Clive Owen’s similar film Shoot ‘Em Up—in which Cage is having sex with a women whilst murdering attacking foes. For, unlike Owen, whose brutish charm is able to carry out the mission of such a chauvinistic scene, Cage, due to the middle-aged desperation that he exudes from every pore, simply appears deflated. Even the whisky Cage is drinking and the cigar he’s smoking while performing these acts fail to hide the scene’s botched attempt to represent masculinity in its utmost glory. And it is through this failure that the grotesque formula of the action hero is broken open and put on display for critical observation.

It is a common misconception that a film must be critically conceived by its author in order to be deemed critical, but I found while watching Drive Angry 3D that the arresting absurdity of Hollywood’s failures is more critically potent than anything designed for Debordian purposes. For while watching the film and observing the mechanisms of popular culture glimmer through the scene in 3D, I felt as though I was seeing something that I wasn’t supposed to be seeing: the space behind the screen, the dark place where cultural myths are made.

Today, deadly warfare overseas is viewed through broadcast images of night-vision crosshairs aimed at invisible enemies thousands of miles away; the consequent civilian casualties are anonymous statistics on the fourth page of the local newspaper. Entertainment means canned laughter, insipid pop culture, and blockbuster spectacles lacking any aesthetic value. The liberating energy of sex and organic human relations is objectified and frozen on billboards and in cyberspace. Millions lost their homes and livelihoods because profit-seeking financiers invest in fictitious capital markets opposed to the general welfare of society. And in the never-ending carnival of electoral politics, partisan ideology is the grossest fiction of all: human miseries and the systems of power that cause them are disguised by acrobatic distortions of truth.

For a broad majority of our generation, the fictions that permeate our social world foster comfortable apathy and a docile unwillingness to act. Illusions paralyze the spectator, since the submission to readymade fantasy is far more convenient than the dangers of autonomous thought. Kant once famously described philosophy, or enlightenment, as the emergence from such self-imposed nonage. The commitment to intellectual emancipation and creative discovery remains as relevant as ever, because the illusions engineered by the minority elite not only mask the truth and fortify the mechanisms of material oppression, but further repress the imagination and subdue the yearning to dream. Philosophy continues to offer the space where illusions are exposed and destroyed by an attitude of daring thought introduced by Kant and adopted by the audacious heirs of modernity ever since.

The university classroom must vigilantly protect this attitude and educate students to challenge the illusions that veil systems of power. Philosophy and, moreover, the health of a democratic society, are threatened when academic curricula today subordinate humanistic inquiry to technocratic education. The objective of higher education ought to be to teach independent, freethinking citizens rather than to produce cogs of a regulated order who reproduce existing hierarchies of power. As Kant recognized, civil society requires a public community that encourages rigorous debate and rational deliberation while objecting to the illusions that inhibit intellectual emancipation. Students can boldly provide a culture that fulfills this role if they voluntarily realize their own agency and their social responsibility to change the world in which they live.

Those of us who were born in the nineties were schooled early in the rhetoric of overwhelming triumphalism as we witnessed the consolidation of global networks through technological innovation and translational development. Paradoxically, our smaller world of seemingly enhanced connectivity fails to provide a sense of belonging. Instead, it fosters predominant feelings of entropy, aimlessness, and alienation.

The bottomless collection of illusions that separate us from our world reinforces this immobilizing estrangement and self-destructive indifference. Nonetheless, if this is a generation that purportedly suffers a loss of purpose or a lack of collective confidence, philosophy points in the direction toward genuine fulfillment and concerted action. The nineteenth-century philosopher Novalis once wrote: “Philosophy is essentially homesickness. It is the urge to be at home everywhere.” The mission of philosophy is to eliminate disharmony and division and to affirm the possibilities of unity and completeness. For today’s youth, the knowledge of the living reality concealed behind illusions is the cause for empowerment, and it is only through this knowledge that any generation will be able to illuminate the road homeward.

We must reconcile our ability to feel for a fictional character with the fact that we know, simultaneously, that such events have not actually transpired in the real world. In order to do so, we must act not as passive readers, who merely absorb fictional facts, but rather as agents, who creatively interact with the work. As readers, we reinterpret fiction by mapping our experiences of the real world onto fictional situations. While the author constructs a fictional universe from pieces of the real world, the reader processes this fictional world and reconstructs fictional situations, using terms that are compatible with their own perspective. Thus, our empathetic connections with literature are not given to us, but are rather created by us through extrapolations from our own experience.

It follows that works of fiction are often praised for their realism in their rendering of a fictional world. Realistic portrayals increase the resemblance of fictional characters to actual people, making it easier for readers to endow fiction with emotional reality. Thus the more detailed the make-up of a fictional character is, the easier it is for us to bridge the gaps between reality and fiction, thereby allowing us to feel empathy. It is necessary to be able to see characters as possible people, or even alternate versions of ourselves, in order to feel for them. A protagonist like Odysseus, for example, is portrayed with such detail and complexity that the reader can see him as a potential human. Thus, when it comes to the reader’s ability to respond emotionally to Odysseus, the fact that he is mythical becomes insignificant.

Fictional characters have no emotional impact on us when we are unable to empathize with them and see them as humans. Writers and filmmakers seem to recognize this when they depict villains as insane, isolated, or soulless– characters who lack humanity.

While fiction can feature unrealistic elements such as seductive Sirens or ferocious Cyclopes, it is ultimately the relations between these outlandish characters that establish their realism and become the decisive factor in eliciting our emotion. Therefore, insofar as it concerns our ability to respond empathetically to fiction, the most important factor is not physical realism, but rather the realistic relationships that unfold in a constructed world—relationships which operate under the same logical constraints as our own. For example, Romeo commits suicide because he thinks that Juliet is dead. His fate was not arbitrary, but was rather the product of a line of causal events. The sequence of events that unfolds has to seem plausible—or even necessary—to us in order for it provoke emotion. This need for logical coherence of the plot defends fiction’s lack of reality from absurdity.

This does not mean to say that there is no room for random events in coherent fiction. Rather, when such events occur, the point of such arbitrariness is to deviate from the logical progression of events in order for the reader to share in this confusion. Thus, while the setup of the fictional world may be distinct from our real world, fiction nevertheless has a causal effect on us. This instinctive reconciliation between the two worlds is evident in the way we are able to respond to literary facts. When we read a book, we know that the characters and their struggles are merely fictional. Nevertheless, we still empathize with fictional characters, and this empathy is independent of the existential reality of what we read.

McCain’s and Obama’s History isn’t what we studied in school. Their History is something independent, something tangible that no longer is a human creation. Instead, History moves and manipulates us; History is our author. History, it appears, has its own laws – and these laws are clear and linear, so that there is a definitive right and wrong side. The study of History, then, isn’t about understanding the past; it’s about trailing the path of History, tracing its trajectory from the past and following it out into the future. Political decisions are motivated by a fear of falling off this arc of History and winding up on the “wrong side” of it. This makes politics sound more like navigating your way through a bad neighborhood with an infallible GPS system than a delicate network of nuanced decision-making; less about independent rationality and more about obedience to a pre-ordained ideal.

History has become a pre-fabricated moral entity, guiding all of our actions. We are pulled along by the predetermined choo-choo train of History, where the hypothetical “I think I can, I think I can” transformed into the definitive “Yes, we can!” The train’s rails are called progress; but does progress actually come from a belief in a linear trajectory towards absolute progress? How can there be a right side of History when History is as fickle as New York City weather? The report promises a 100% chance of sunny democracy, but instead we get the Rains of Terror. A song for Soviet children perfectly encapsulates this misinformation: “our train flies forward, our next stop is communism; there is no other way, we have a rifle in our hands.” The glorious, predetermined future requires armed insurrection – the glory and “rightness” is ultimately dubious. History doesn’t seem so linear after all.

Social “progress,” I would argue, does come from History, but History in its more past-oriented incarnation. Society progresses from an analysis and internalization of our history – progress is often a response to the past. We weigh past events and motivations against our fundamental and essential values. Progress is an internal project. It is an active evaluation, rather than a passive, but aggressive trailing. Rhetoric about a pre-existing right or wrong side to History exactly discourages this sort of reflective internalization. It lulls us into a sense of illusory complacency, as if that internalization has already taken place – a sort of pre-fabicrated analysis that applies neatly to all political decisions. Post-WWII German politics provides an example, which points us to the origin of social progress. Germany has institutionalized a “never forget” policy so that the atrocities of WWII will never happen again on German soil. And it is this intense and constant introspection that has allowed Germany to emerge from its horrific past.

Rhetoric about “The right side of History” is pure sophistry: emotionally stirring, but dangerous. When our politicians blithely throw around their rhetoric they’re actually dabbling in an irresponsible and insidious understanding of History. Rather than delegating their decision-making responsibility to History, it’s time for politicians to defend their policies by formulating their own arguments, appealing to concrete facts and pointing to common values.

P: I’d like to start this debate with an example of a joke from Kant:
An Englishman and an Indian man are in a bar in northwest India, and the Englishman opens his bottle of ale, and the foam comes out and goes all over the table. The Indian man jumps up and down in excitement. When he expresses his excitement, the Englishman makes a condescending remark, “what’s so special about a beer flowing over?” the Indian man responds that he is not at all amazed by what came out of the bottle, but instead by how much liquid managed to fit there in the first place.
The punchline resides in the fact that the Indian man had made a sophisticated observation about the nature of carbonation in a particular thermodynamic system. While not funny in itself, it evokes laughter as it relieves our prejudicial assumptions about the Indian man’s ignorance. These prejudices are the result, of course, of the dialectic between society and the self. Thus, the joke serves as a disruptive resolution. The punchline makes sense of the bizarre situation presented in the joke, but with that relief comes a moment of socially disruptive self-reflexivity. Our conventional expectation that the joke would enact a typical racist mockery was alleviated. But in so doing the joke is on us. We are embarrassed by our internalized social expectations of the Indian man’s ignorance.
This, to me, is the same function as philosophy. Philosophy, in this sense, is a joke. It serves as a fundamentally disruptive resolution, an unsettling response to life’s questions. The philosophical response never really provides an answer, but begs the inquisitor to re-conceptualize the meaning of the question itself. But if it is a joke in Kant’s sense, then what is the punchline? Well, I claim that philosophy’s punchline is the attempt at the universal. While universality on its own is by no means inherently a farce, the idea that a concept is universal now, that this is true forever and ever right now, this is the true farce in philosophy. But it’s also the reason philosophy exists. Otherwise things would have ended with Plato, or in some people’s conception with Hegel. This is because just as you cannot hear the same joke twice, you cannot have the same universal twice. Thus, as history moves forward, so does philosophy, constantly reassessing its position, to keep up with history’s rapid tides.

B: It’s interesting that you mention things ending with Plato. The philosopher Alfred North Whitehead once said that, “all of western philosophy consists of footnotes to Plato,” and that’s where I wanted to begin. I actually view Whitehead’s sentiment negatively. You can interpret that quote to mean—though Whitehead certainly didn’t mean this—that philosophy has not really gotten anywhere since Plato raised all of the interesting issues. Perhaps we have had no real resolutions, disruptive or otherwise.
I suppose my concept of a joke here is the cruel sense in which you might play a trick on someone. Philosophy plays a joke on its students and, ultimately, on itself. If it were a joke, the punchline would be institutional aporia, a confused state of befuddlement, a state in which you have no idea what the hell has just happened. The joke of philosophy would end with the philosophers rooted to one place—just like Plato—thinking really hard, as the rest of the world ticked rapidly onward. Of course, being smart and honest people, they would realize at the end of that long day that they have not come very far at all.
All of Plato’s early dialogues end with aporia: his interlocutor, trapped in self-contradiction, becomes confused, fed up, and departs. Then you move to the middle dialogues—the Republic being the most famous—where you have some real theory building. This is where analytic philosophy is today: we build theories. We emphasize some theories and deemphasize others.
One way of interpreting Plato’s later dialogues is a return to aporia. Things don’t get decided anymore. So in the Theaetetus, one of the more advanced dialogues that gets a lot attention today, nothing gets decided. It’s as if we’ve gone from the early dialogues, and it looks as if we’ve progressed with the theory of Forms and other elegant ideas that people still cling onto, and then you go back to the state of aporia, with no theories at all, or at least a severe calling into question of the previous theories.
I had high hopes for philosophy when I became a student of it. One thing it has taught me is to become more skeptical and, hence, more cynical. I’ve done that, and I’ve come to the point of turning skepticism against philosophy itself, quite defiantly.
Philosophy today (and I mean primarily analytic philosophy, though, for me, there are really no other alternatives) has become so specialized that nothing meaningful is really being said. And the only useful work being done is by necessity outside of the frame of pure philosophy. It’s done with other disciplines.

P: The world and all its complex contingencies do not rush over the philosopher like a rock in a river, as you seem to claim. Rather, the philosopher is like a mill, and as the river of history moves through the mill, it moves the philosopher, who in turn changes history’s course. Philosophers constantly reassess their position.
B: You and I have very different conceptions of what philosophy is today. I really believe that philosophy is in the academy; philosophy is very much analytic philosophy. It is not continental philosophy, which has adopted Hegel, Nietzsche and Marx and has gone on to discuss them ad nauseum. The real philosophers are Frege, Russell, Wittgenstein, and that strand of philosophy. Everybody outside of that is doing social theory or political theory. You could call it philosophical, especially as they discuss people like Marx and Hegel, but you could not strictly call it philosophy.
You said that philosophy is like a mill, and the river of history is flowing through it, and the philosopher is always questioning his or her conception of the world. The problem with the mill model is that if you were to design something like it, you would have the mill in the middle of a river that is flowing in a circle. In that circle, philosophers like Plato and Kant would keep travelling through the mill over and over again, as contemporary philosophers constantly reinterpret those views. That, for me, is a bleak picture. At best, you have the illusion of progress.

P: It strikes me that you seem to suffer from a sort of institutional Stockholm syndrome. You accuse the academy of killing philosophy, yet you have internalized the academic philosopher’s claim that they are the last word in philosophy. Furthermore, you reject the same movements in philosophy that the academics have deemed improper.
However, Philosophy is nimble, it always responds to contingency in some manner or another, otherwise it’s useless. This is clear in philosophy’s fundamental materialist turn. When Hegel invoked Aesop’s “Hic Rhodus, hic saltus!” and directs the philosopher, “here is the rose, dance here,” he makes the significant claim that the rational lies, fundamentally, in the real. Marx internalized Hegelian dialectical idealism and extricated its abstract spirituality, grounding it in materialist criticism, particularly in his analysis of religion. The theoretical innovations that Marx provided laid the groundwork for the most important philosophical movements of the last century, particularly Critical Theory. It was the Critical Theorists that constantly reengaged with history and society, creating a flexible conception of universality that is fundamental to understanding philosophy as it stands today. So the dialectical disruptive resolution between the self and society, which originated in the classical thinkers and is still maintained today, dubs your “real philosophers” non-philosophers.
B: First of all, the idea that philosophers should be changing the world makes them philosophers and something else. Their role is to understand the world. To understand a range of non-specialized questions: What is knowledge? What is the good? What is morality? To ask these sorts of questions.
That is the role of philosophy, to begin to understand the world. And that ultimately boils down to theory-building. It does not boil down to changing the world. I can be a philosopher and an activist, but I cannot be a philosopher-activist.
And you have to realize that this theory building at the end of the day does not get us much closer to the truth. The philosopher is just sort of poking around in the dark, as if she’s seen the sun, and come back into the cave. But the sun has been imagined.

P: So you end with this idea that if philosophy were to look at itself critically it would terminate. In a way that is precisely what happened, the way you conceive of philosophy as a proper discipline did terminate itself. But that’s precisely why philosophy is not in a state of aporia. It’s the very turn towards the material, towards adapting to contingency—that originates with thinkers like Hegel—that makes it so.
So, if the debate has turned into a discussion about whether is philosophy even worth practicing, I would say yes. Philosophy, as it has adapted to modern contingencies, is absolutely worth it.

I think the answer to this question is also found in Li Chen’s article: “As readers, we reinterpret fiction by mapping our experiences of the real world onto fictional situations.” In Borges’s story, the fictional situation would seem to be solely physical: a description of the universe’s fantastic chambers, books, staircases, etc. But this physical description quickly translates into correspondingly bizarre social, theological, and political structures. Fictions such as these create meaning through the disparities the reader notices between the constructed world and the real world, just as fictional relationships create meaning through their similarities to actual relationships. These disparities in social organization have the potential to serve as a profound critique of our world, both by presenting new possibilities previously unimagined and by illuminating structures that we take for granted. One genre that in particular excels at such tasks is science fiction, where countless worlds are extrapolated from our own. Viewed in this light, science fiction becomes a powerful creative tool for the radical critique of our own world.

Not every work of science fiction challenges our complacent acceptance of the world we live in: the universe of the Star Wars series, for instance, serves only the purpose of providing a stage on which to enact a simple morality tale. Works like these, which choose not to exploit the tension between real and fictional worlds, become mere fantasy. The artist constructs an alternate world, but without a political motivation, it devolves into artistic masturbation: the construction of a world simply for the pleasure of such creation. The parallels with philosophy are impossible to miss; in our field, there are both those who seek truth for truth’s sake and those who seek truth for humanity’s sake. For those in the latter group, science fiction can be a powerful tool to attack the systems which determine our lives today and to propose alternatives to those systems.

Science fiction, I think, has the potential to be an even stronger method of critique than works of fiction set in worlds closer to our own. The central technique of this genre is that of extrapolation; an author of science fiction takes an idea, trend, or phenomenon to its logical end. Works of science fiction are not concerned with the unity of what will be, but rather with the multiplicity of what could be. This very multiplicity is a challenge to the dominant ideology of the author’s time, which exercises a monopoly on the process of interpreting not just what is and what was, but also what will be and what could be. For instance, in Brave New World, Aldous Huxley presents a portrait of a consumerist dystopia that forces its members to pursue mindless pleasure. This book is not terrifying because Huxley convinces us that this is what the future will be; rather, he is showing us what could develop from our world’s current trends. Here is where the emotional impact of the work resides.

Science fiction is written in the conditional tense: almost every work of this genre presents a world that was previously unimaginable until the author described it. Thus, even apparently apolitical works of science fiction are unconsciously political. For instance, many critics found the original Star Wars trilogy to be blatantly anti-democratic in its portrayal of the few Jedi as the only hope in the battle against evil, with the unwashed masses playing the role of cannon fodder at best. Further, the movies’ honorable and bloodless violence cannot but reinforce our culture’s totally unrealistic view of war. The job of the philosopher, then, is to bring these hidden political assumptions and arguments to light and to interrogate them as part of a critical project to better the world via truth for humanity’s sake.