Back in the 1980s, I wrote that, “we all live in Aristotle’s mind”, which is to say that his grid of classifications and categories form the default template of the entire Occidental culture, and all the subcultures arraigned under its rubric.
The Indian philosophical tradition has all of the Greek within it, but quite a lot more, as well. If that tradition was never truly engaged with, by the Occident, kept at varying degrees of exoticising distance, it nevertheless directly captured both ancient Greece, with scepticism; Europe, with the number system; and the modern logic of Anglo-American modernity, with Navya Nyaya logic.
Scepticism, mathematics, and modern logic, all directly derive from an Indian source.
Given that derivation, it can equally be said, that “we all live in an Indian source”.
Exclusively monolinear rationalisations of substantial assumption have a tendency to habitually exploit schemas, configurations, and associations of element distribution, whatever the base elements are held to be in the field of consideration, that only derive from simply assumed ranges of positivist use or utility. In other words, the loci of interest are always, whether overtly or secretly, utilitarian; derived from utilitarian imagery, from pictures of conventional anthropic practice. This has the effect, in those who follow such rationalisations, of always restraining theoretical mobility to this subliminal metaphoric of habitually monolinear utility.
This is not just language as incessant representation.
The notion of representation is easily susceptible to semantic expansions, to the extent that any sign, signifying in any way, whatsoever, can be said to be ‘representational’; in that it re-presents, at least, the signifying operation of its identity as sign; and the function of its signified, whatever its operand, so to speak, whether a traditional, worldly referent is involved or not. Similarly, for the referential function, irrespective of whether or not actual references are involved.
Of course, the notion of presentation ‘itself’, in advance of any assumed repetition of ‘it’, as an ‘identity’, would be sufficient to bring representation into question, ‘showing’ its conventionality.
There’s nothing at all necessarily wrong with representation or reference. The practices and notions of representation and reference, in and of themselves, are not the problem. But they are a problem, there is a necessity of wrongness, when they’re done badly.
Some of the characteristics of exclusively substantial representation; of blocked, substantive rationalisations whose exclusive raison d’etre is always some mystical mishmash of utility; are its failures to achieve multidimensional clarity, due to the hasty impatience of a monomaniacal mindset limited only to the dogmatic modality of positivist pursuits. This leads to the hysteria of positivist limitation and production, whose time compressions and addictive need for the ecstasies of immediate resolution, displace genuine concern for the complexities of theoretically wide-ranging, verbal mediation; leading to a stylistics of telegraphic reduction of expression, attempting to compensate for its theoretical impoverishment through incessant metonymic appealings towards scenarios of conventional intuition. This continues the movement of reduction under the guise of the most moderate of multidimensional considerations. Merely switching and shuttling constantly, between heavily conventionalised mediums, usually offering this revelation of banal transcendences as a compensation for complexities it is either too lazy or too stupid to engage. This, of course, constitutes the disingenuous appeal of a Wittgensteinian ‘show and tell’, or ‘show’ instead of ‘tell’. One in which positivist dishonesty desperately casts about in every conventional medium to which it has ignorant access, in order to put on a shell game, or a ‘shell show’, of compensations circling from convention to convention, in its hysterical festival of banal substitutions. These are the prevarications of the philosophical hawk or hawker, and it isn’t difficult to know which parts of the world, and which types of people, they primarily originate from. This professionalisation of ‘profitability’ consists entirely of competence in producing monolinear results in environments of multidimensional contingency, but wholly at the expense of those environments, and according to the structure of the ‘shell game ‘, where the pea of profit is secretly inserted, only under the conman’s profiteering cup.
So it’s not representation, per se, that in and of itself necessarily leads to the closures of dogmatic substantialism; but it is a certain practice of representation; a quite misplaced, because over generalised, and exclusively held, positivist economics of reduction. The very disciplinary fanaticism of frugality, as an idealisation stemming from deprivation anxiety, serves as hegemonic horizon for an always hallucinated positivist closure. This fixation ineluctably leads to a ‘semantics of stone’.