Terada - Looking Away (Selections).pdf - Townsend Humanities Lab

14 looking away
Again, there are many ways of imagining what it means to “value”
facts—from the bare identification of a piece of reality, at one pole, to “accepting”
it (the most undertheorized possibility), to endorsing it, to cheering
it on. Not only is fact/value conflation ingrained in psychology; the
various senses of “value” are also, as a consequence of the fact/value conflation,
secondarily conflated. The more you conflate fact and value, the
more you’re going to count identifying the bare existence of something as
endorsing it. And as already mentioned, it’s also uncertain what counts as a
fact. There’s all the difference in the world between natural, inevitable
facts or conditions and contingent, temporary ones, yet it’s often obscure
which are which, and that ambiguity is available to be exploited. Gardenvariety
facts may be treated as though by their facticity as such they participated
in a more significant and lawful necessity. In the realm of the social,
there are probably very few true inevitabilities, yet many conditions
are constant or recurrent enough to make one ask whether they might
possibly be inevitable, even though questions about the bounds of the social
can never be laid to rest from within the social. Freud’s question about
whether the baseline discontent caused by “states and societies” is finally
“a piece of unconquerable nature” is the paradigm of all such open questions.
16
Now, the association between phenomenality and dissatisfaction—the
subject of this book—is the underside of the fact/value problem, formed
by the negative members of the series appearance/reality and dissatisfaction/satisfaction.
Descartes describes the “various motions ...traced out
in the air by the tip of the quill” while he is writing, which sketch a second
script behind him “even though I do not conceive of anything real passing
from one end to the other.” 17 Like that second, aerial script, the problem
of phenomenality and dissatisfaction follows that of fact and value in an
unattended way.
There would seem to be something illegitimate about the position of
“appearance” within this formulation. Even before Kant, an appearance is
16. Civilization and Its Discontents [1930], in SE XXI: 64–145, p. 88.
17. Rules for the Direction of the Mind, in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, trans.
John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch (Cambridge: Cambridge
UP, 1985), 1: Rule 12.