Radical enlightenment philosophy animates the subversive character of Disney’s indestructible classic Alice in Wonderland (Israel, Spinoza), radical in the singular use of redness to demonstrate the concept self-conscious unity of apperception (Pippen, Kant), subversive in pointing to its own performance of artifice (painting the roses), which simultaneously instructs and critiques the use of technology as cultural strategy (Byrd, Stevens). The data structure of this particular scene, encapsulated in song, possesses an agency that is remote in space and time from its creators (Beynon-Davis). Arguably, the work constituted an act of creation as an instituting fact (Derrida, Husserl).

Despite all this, the question is whether such a constituted work, motored by a largeness of pedagogical, philosophical, and political ambitions, can do (kora) the constitutive work of self-consciousness for viewing audiences, and the answer is that it can’t (but neither should the hysteric’s demand for a rose garden be confused for the promise of one). The critique that lends itself most readily to a necessarily skeptical view holds that the unforgettable, built to last quality of Disney’s cultural artefact supplants the firstness of intrapersonal communication (said to always precede interpersonal communication in writing communities). Moreover, in terms of intended viewing audiences, Byrd’s reading of Stevens applies here in order to draw out a similar binding of energy of the wilderness, in this case the wilderness of the mind and its untapped potentials, prior to such a mind’s understanding of itself as that. Yet such a critique seems to commit an error where it treats all at once what is intended to take place on multiple planes (if something does take place): the imprinting on memory of the scene and its subsequent reading for its pedagogical, philosophical structuring that in turn permits of its own critique.

Questions of critique include whether a coerced or otherwise false unity of perception is at all times to be regarded as illegitimate, something like a forced confession, or whether it has a time and place proper to it. Was this forging, this counterfeiting of unity, at one time regarded as necessary, and what kind of consent would have issued from it? On an individual scale, is it always the mark of an inability to tell things apart, and does a foundational act of violence committed in my name make it more or less difficult (or even relevant) for me to do the work of making such distinctions?

It seems to me that if the consent thereby secured has less to do with something given freely by me, that represents my ability to reason independently in an age of reason (than it does, say, of an already constituted mechanical obeisance to formal rules), it brings to mind the kind of philosophers Nietzsche derided, those who would demand of Truth she reveal herself. On the other hand, if a rule bound formal logic that proceeds according to factual premises is a kind of tyranny of reason which can’t be separated out from the time and place of the larger tyranny it seeks to overthrow, there must be a more constrained sense of freedom that prepares the ground for a more recognizable and celebrated freedom of association and consent. Then, if the overthrow of tyranny is not in itself a free act but one undertaken in a constituting sense of urgency and necessity, the basis for it as an instituting fact can’t be assumed as free of any founding act of violence. That is why freedom of reason as popularly conceived can’t thrive under such conditions, why democracy’s experimental character strikes one as incompatible, out of step, with more garden variety, ‘coerced’ democratic stylings. The sequential nature of what one does at a given time and place must also be why, as Saint-Exupery concluded in his memoir, conquest and settlement take place at different times and at appropriate stages. Confusion of one for the other or both taking place ‘at the same time’ suggests a painting over of important temporal distinctions.

Saint-Exupery wrote that the days of marveling over technology belong to a past of colonial conquest and is the mark of immaturity. Where this attitude persists, it implies a lateness of arrival, a lack of historicity. He compared a perfected technology to a healthy functioning heart: one doesn’t continually notice it. In that case, and with the added coloring of Derrida’s introduction to Husserl’s Origin of Geometry, what’s also implied when a perfected technology doesn’t blend in with its surroundings is a “static world of constituted significations,” within which hallucination is “truth’s accomplice.” Derrida wrote the contrary to hallucination is not directly perception but sense perception, “the consciousness of historicity and the reawakening of origins”:

“To proceed to the ground and primordial constitution of truth, we must return, starting from the real world, to a creative experience…this experience remains, de jure as well as de facto, first” (1962, 46).

The pairing of Saint-Exupery with Derrida makes available another perspective from which to consider why technological “utilization” anaesthetizes, immures, and alienates even with its delivery on the promise of heightened sensory perception and other capabilities. There must be two grounds/planes/times in operation here, perhaps even engendered and maintained as such, that produce the kind of hallucinatory world mentioned above. A technology made insensible to its surroundings hurries along the arrival to a primordial state, the attaining of the object sooner rather than later, which truncated delay makes an impossibility of the absolute ideal as opposed to its realization which is said to consist in this delay. Ultimately, it can only constitute the kind of history Kant is said to have been indifferent to, “one that is simply extrinsic and empirical” (Derrida). It bears the signs of that kind of strange unity which tries to impose a sense of itself as all there is, but falls short of this demand which never can be satisfied in any case, not only owing to an inability/refusal to tell what was red from what is in a constitutive act of self-consciousness, but neither is there a sense of response-ibility that would account for the harnessing of and exploitation of past grievances to make claims on the present.

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