This post is a response to this, https://socialecologies.wordpress.com/2018/04/26/thought-of-the-day-the-limits-of-the-mind/
The span of the hand, of the ‘grasp’, of its apprehension; quite literally, a digital thought.
What is a ‘hand’, if not a digital economy of articulations belonging to some neural intent.
The dogmatist, a conceptual hick, clinging to the surfaces of unquestioned convention, there is only the positivist abbreviation of a hand as its mere anatomical form, together with the range of conventional uses and experiences associated with it. But such a domestication, perhaps appealing to a banal democracy of habitual use, neglects the richness of experience associated with this crucial element of anatomy. The dogmatist equating the expedient banality of his own ‘handy’ conceptions, with those of everyone else, merely engages in the universalising of that expedient banality, blocking any revelation of experiential richness that might reside in alternative, anatomical contexts.
The hand as a speculative figure, has been projected into many contexts, exceeding those of anatomy. But even in its anatomical setting, there is a richness of cultural relation irreducible to any single, positivist surface. The interiority, as it were, of speculative extensions issuing from such a richness of relation, literally within the hands grasp, can be contrasted with the exteriority of metaphoric projections, in which the figure of the hand and its qualities constitute a veritable swarm of metonymies.
The dogmatist, habituated to piloting only along positivist routes, can no longer think in any other way, reduced to squawking about a ‘truth’, which is merely the hypothesised, positivist form of his own alienation, stubbornly haunting his every ignorant thought.
Genghis Khan often used to signature himself as “the Hand of God”. It’s unlikely that he was a dogmatist.