Disruptive Noumena
Siddharth Soni I. Linda Gascrif’s visual poem appears in a September 2005 edition of the Times Literary Supplement: “… I give you blank space { } to protest.” Only a few weeks from then, a Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten had run a series of cartoons that depicted the Muhammad in a satirical manner. Islam has always had a strong tradition of aniconism, and the cartoons were expeditiously labeled as blasphemous, based on which a fatwa was issued against the cartoonists. The incident ensued a fashionable debate between creative expression (or expression per se) and inclemency of religious (and social) proscriptions. The newspaper denounced the reaction to their cartoons claiming that they were not to disenfranchise Muslim population or to belittle god, but to make them an equal part of the Danish satire tradition. A bigger debate about self-censorship in the modern world was also born. Deeper south in the restless Israel-Palestine, poetry is impulsive and loud, but manages to be theologically blind, to articulate a phenomenal depth of personal and political experiences that are forced upon by circumstances of violent conflict. A deadening struggle of ‘being’ becomes the thematic preoccupation of Mahmoud Darwish’s poetry: “I have a name without a title / and the color of poetry is coal-black.” Even when the poetry is not about Islam or Judaism, or when its religious convictions are oversighted, it remains incontestably political, as if its aspiration is to ‘do’ something for proper peace between Israel and Palestine. An echo of the same kind of aspiration is found in the literature written in the earliest of our three considerations: Jewish novelists, poets and war-reporters from the World War II and cold war era, whose trusts and sympathies were inexorably linked to the Jewish in the Soviet Union. Their work glistened with reality, delaminated Soviet practices and demanded emancipation of the Soviet Jewry. The politburo found the political nature of their work so threatening that Mikhail Suslov explained to Vassily Grossman; the ideological chief at politburo to the novelist who spearheaded the Jewish Anti-Fascist Movement: “Why should we add your book to the atomic bombs that our enemies are preparing to launch against us?… Why should we publish your book and begin a public discussion as to whether anyone needs the Soviet Union or not?” 1 At some point, what was incipiently only a kind of ‘resistance literature,’ becomes in an unwarrantable manner, a kind of ‘resistance towards literature’ – a kind of censorship. It is essential to outline what behavioral counteraction is responsible for creating that ‘resistance towards literature’. Is that counteraction explainable in a heteronomous world? Is censorship ethical? To answer these questions, it is also critical to enquire what created the action for the counteraction to be made possible: What is the nature of this resistance literature? It may be worthwhile to recall here those ideas of enlightenment that reasoned for freedom of expression with a certain litheness and tact. One of its principal tacticians, Immanuel Kant is relevant for a modern trial yet again. We will rephrase and transfer our question to him: Is it possible to fancy absolute freedom of expression in the modern world, as it involves essentially uncensored views on religion, state and society? Does the Kantian freedom of expression depend on its ability to resonate with what domain of consciousness, private or public, it’s applied to? If so, is that freedom any freedom? The readily acceptable answers are no, yes and it isn’t. In Kantian terms, an argument henceforward will introduce a case for the counteraction as due to disruptive noumena– a definitive category that could be appended to every such action that is a political expression not based upon mathematical or logical reality, and that disrupts or disagrees with a norm or an ideological touchstone. Danish cartoons in Jyllands-Posten,Darwish’s poetry and Soviet Jewish literature are all examples of political expressions that both shake an ideology, and is based out of pure intellectual intuition. 2 All kinds of expressions against a norm or an ideology is generated by what Kant would call alterations in someone’s perception or “sense-cognizance towards its object.” 3 Knowledge for him, was a “phenomenon” that was built upon “non-objectionable” (and reasoned) derivatives of interactions with anything that appeared to the senses. This knowledge was derivative, and was therefore based on a priori (or what was precedently composed). A judgment of reason, thereupon, became inapplicable to everything that was in the realm of “indescribable” or “metaphysical” which he called “noumenon.” 4 All noumena were unknowable as they were not observable occurrences but “ideas of a philosophical mind.” 5 Poetry, pamphlets, cartoons, novels, critical theory and almost every discipline under philosophy become noumenal actualities of the world, to which the salient ‘non-objectionableness’ of his definition of human knowledge is irrelative. Even by Kant’s own rigorous trials of human understanding, the deficiency of his enlightenment theory to explain what to do with polemical judgments of reason with unorthodox-intellectual-political-expression, or disruptive noumena, is the bane of why absolute freedom of expression is an unyielding enterprise. An interesting observation here is that Schopenhauer, one of Kant’s foremost critics also fails to answer how a state should deal with disruptive noumena. However, he undertakes a facultative project to establish his meaning of the term ‘noumena’ against Kant’s: “But it was just this understood difference between abstract knowledge and knowledge of perception that [Kant] ignored: What is thought (noumenon) to what is perceived reality (phenomenon).[…] Kant, who […] entirely neglected the thing for the expression of which those words phenomena and noumena had already been taken, now takes possession of the words, as if they were still unclaimed, in order to denote by them his things-in-themselves and his phenomena.” 6 Our definition of ‘noumenon’ consorts more closely with Schopenhauer than with Kant, and remarkably so, as ideological exercises in poetry, novels and cartoons are inarguable to be seen as ‘things-in-themselves’ since their antecedental existence isn’t defined. There was no ‘poetry as black as coal’ before Darwish thought